


Second Chances Come From Dying Gods

by thesmallchameleon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Canon Jewish Character, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everybody Lives, Excuse me while I take my favorite parts of the book and jam them haphazardly into the movie canon, F/M, Fortune Cookies, Gen, Ghost Stanley Uris, Ghosts, Graphic Depictions of Gross Things, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Medical Inaccuracies, Recovery, Richie tells insensitive jokes, Serious discussions of suicide, Stan-Centric, Suicide, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), There's implied Reddie but I didn't want to tag it and trick people lol, graphic injury depiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 07:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 30,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26469745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesmallchameleon/pseuds/thesmallchameleon
Summary: Stanley Uris has never believed in a heaven or hell, but this would be it for him, wouldn't it? Getting to see all of his friends one last time, only to watch them all die horribly. That's why he didn't go. That's why hecouldn'tgo. He couldn't stand by and see them die. He couldn't walk into this town again and never come out.But here he is anyway. And wasn't it stupid to think that he wouldn't be? He made a promise.Or: What if after Stan died, he came back to Derry as a ghost? Forced to watch his friends suffer, and unable to help them. Unless...
Relationships: Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24





	1. After Life

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I didn't mean to rewrite the entirety of Chapter 2. It just sort of happened. The second part should be much more original I promise.

Stanley Uris takes a bath.

And then

Death is like falling asleep. Everything is warm and wet and growing foggier by the minute. Everything is pain and light and pins and needles. Cold spreading from the inside out. One moment everything is swimming. Ha ha. Swimming. Get it? And then suddenly it isn't. Suddenly nothing is.

Nowhere is dark.

That's what he has to think, because he can't see. But it's not like being in a dark room with your eyes open because he doesn't have eyes. Not here. Doesn't have any of the rest of him either. There are no fingernails to press down the beds of his fingers because there are no fingers. There is no stomach to bulge and recede with every breath because there is no breath. There are no lungs. There are no lips that rest together softly, or tongue to push against his teeth because there are no teeth, no tongue, no hard pallet or uvula,

you get the idea.

He is nowhere, and there is nothing.

But no, that's not right is it? Because _he's_ here. So that's something, right? Somehow, despite the void, the lack, the sheer emptiness that should pull anything to pieces until it crumbles and dissolves and becomes by unbecoming, he's here.

And there's something else too.

When it speaks, it comes from everywhere.

"Oh Stanley," it says.

And it's not It. Not It with a capital _I_ , but it's Something with a capital Something, that's for sure.

"Why did you do that, Stanley?"

And he tries to answer. He tries to speak. To form words with the lips he doesn't have and push them out with the air that isn't there. To make sound in a vacuum.

_I had to take myself off the board._

It doesn't work, but the Something understands.

"Why?"

_I was too weak. I was always the weakest._

"So?"

_So, I was going to get them all killed._

"That's stupid."

_Is it?_

"You're strongest when you're all together. You know that."

_They'll be stronger without me._

"Is that what you think?"

_Yes._

"I thought you were supposed to be the sensible one, kid."

_Excuse me?_

"I don't have time to lay it all out for you. I'm busy getting my affairs in order."

_What?_

"I'm dying, kid. Pretty soon it's just going to be you."

 _Wait_ —

"You better start walking."

_Walking? How can I walk? I don't have—_

And then he does. It's still dark, and he can barely feel them, but they're there. _He's_ there. Not nowhere anymore, not quite. Maybe on the edge of it though.

"Come on kid."

The voice of the great big Something is fading.

"It's not ideal, but contingency plans rarely are."

He can't hear it anymore, and part of him thinks that's probably a good thing. He doesn't think he could keep the pieces of himself together for long if it went on talking to him.

The rest of him mourns.

He starts walking. It's strange, walking with a body that isn't in a place that barely is. Without a ground to press against, it doesn't feel much like he's moving, but he must be. He can feel it. Each step takes him a little further away from Nothing, and a little bit towards Something.

_I want to run towards something._

He doesn't know what that something is, but he's definitely moving towards it. Not because the Turtle told him to (Turtle?). Not because he's afraid of the Nothing he left behind. But because he wants to.

_I have to see this through._

Time is strange here. He has no way of knowing how much of it passes, if it passes at all. He just walks. One foot in front of the other. Steady. Rhythmic. Unafraid.

_Am I afraid?_

No. Logically speaking there's nothing left to be afraid _of_. He's dead. There is no monster. There is no pain. There is nothing left to lose.

_The thing about being a Loser is…_

Suddenly he sees something. Just a smear of shadow in his lower periphery. And normally he wouldn't notice at all, but he's been in this darkness for so _long_ (or has he?) and the impression of something in this endless nothing is jarring. He lifts his hand. It's hard to make out, but he thinks he can make out the motion of it as he moves it across his face.

He keeps walking.

He doesn't look at his hands for a long time. Just stares straight ahead and walks. And when he accidentally catches a familiar flash of motion in the corner of his eye some time later, he can vaguely make out the shape of his fingers.

With every step he takes, the shape of his body becomes more defined. He can see his feet moving beneath him, can tell he's wearing shoes. They look like his brown loafers from the shape of them, though he can't tell the color. He can make out the sleeve of his cardigan and, when he looks down, the buttons on his shirt.

And it's not just himself.

He starts to notice shadows around him. Big shapes that stand stationary as he passes them, and little ones that scurry or tumble by. Buildings, small animals, litter. Cars rolling by. What's the opposite of a shadow? What is a vague silhouette of light cast against the darkness?

_It is light. Light that must be snuffed out by darkness._

What is?

_You know._

And no. No no no no no no no.

A neon light blinks on, and Stan knows where he is.

The Jade of the Orient looks exactly like it did when it opened. Stan would know; he remembers it opening. Derry went through a bit of a boom in the years he grew up there. With the opening of the mall in '81 came an array of businesses and restaurants that would have never been found in a backwater town like Derry only a few years prior. He doesn't remember what year this one opened; he's never been inside. But he remembers seeing the neon lights light up the commercial district of Derry that seemed to grow and grow, once upon a time. And now he can see those lights blink on around him, one by one like stage lights and—

_It's not fair._

_It's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair._

Isn't it?

Because Stan's never believed in a heaven or hell, but this would be it for him, wouldn't it? Getting to see all of his friends one last time, only to watch them all die horribly. That's why he didn't go. That's why he _couldn't_ go. He couldn't stand by and see them die. He couldn't walk into this town again and never come out.

But here he is anyway. And wasn't it stupid to think that he wouldn't be? He made a promise. An oath.

 _Swear it_.

"I swear, Bill," he says quietly. And he can actually speak this time, even though the air passing through his lungs and trachea is passing in all directions, not the way it's supposed to. He wonders if anyone else would even be able to hear him. Somehow he doesn't think that's how this works.

A car pulls up into the parking lot, and Stan watches as a man gets out. He's not very tall, has light, overgrown hair, and for the brief glance Stan gets of his face, he looks so determined it hurts.

It's the flannel that gets him. 27 years later and Bill Denbrough still wears flannel.

"Bill," he says. And Bill doesn't notice him, so he has to think that he's right. That he can't be seen or heard.

Bill starts towards the restaurant and Stan finds himself following in a stupor. It's so easy to fall into step behind him that Stan barely realizes he's doing it until they're halfway through the restaurant and the hostess is directing him into a private room.

Even then, he's so caught up in the strangeness that is looking _down_ at Bill that he doesn't notice the man standing in the corner until he's lunging towards them.

_Towards Bill. Not you. Because you're not here._

And Stan barely recognizes him at first because Mike was always tall but this Mike is _huge_ and his face is squished into Bill's shoulder like he's found a part of himself that he lost and never wants to let go.

Stan gets it. It would be like that with any of them. They all broke their souls into seven parts that summer and passed around the pieces. But it's different too, because it's Bill. And when Mike pulls back there's such a stark look of _relief_ on his face. Like he's finally come home. Finally safe.

Yeah. Even dead, seeing Big Bill does that to Stan too.

"Of course _you_ came," Mike says, and it's the emphasis on the _you_ that cuts through Stan. Because Mike's been waiting here for 27 years, threw his life away, and somehow still thinks that any of them would give up on him after all he's given away for them.

_I didn't give up on you Mike. I promise._

He feels a little voyeuristic, standing there and watching them reconnect without knowing he's there. In a way it feels like old times. He was always a watcher, a witness. Even so, there's some relief when he hears footsteps approaching and a voice he would recognize anywhere.

"—and if I eat a cashew I could realistically…die. Holy shit."

_Holy shit is right._

Eddie Kaspbrak hasn't changed _at all_. He's about Stan's height now, but he still has that same jittery energy, the same _enormous_ doe eyes that make the rest of him look small in comparison. As much as he hates to admit it, Bill and Mike he might not have recognized without context, without the expectation that they'd be there. But Eddie. Eddie, he could spot across a full arena and pick out the same tiny bundle of isopropyl, neurosis, and rage he knew when they were kids.

He watches Mike smother him in a hug, slotting another piece of his soul that walked away back into place. Eddie holds him tight for a moment longer than Stan thought he would, and then he stands in front of Bill, so palpably nervous and overwhelmed that he might as well be shuffling his feet. And when Bill opens his arms and lets Eddie step into them, there it is again.

_Coming home._

It hurts to watch and not feel.

He's barely gotten over the shock of Eddie when the gong suddenly rings out behind them. All four of them turn, and suddenly it's _BenBevRichie_ , and Stan feels like he's knocked over with the force of seeing them all again. Ben is _huge_ and so is Richie, and Stan _knows_ Richie would be giving him shit for it if he knew how much Stan had to tilt his chin up to look at him now. Not to mention Beverly is tiny, and isn't that a mindfuck if there's ever been one?

_God, Bev._

He'd recognize her anywhere, and it's not the red hair (though that certainly helps.) It's that smile. Quirking and wary, but so _defiant_. There's so much joy spilling from her eyes, and Stan can feel the satisfaction, the pride, in seeing all of her boys again.

Yeah. They were always her boys.

And poor Ben, who always had more body than he knew what to do with. He still does, and even though it's in a different direction now, he's still so clearly uncomfortable in his own skin. He tries to hide it under all of those layered shirts, the same way he did with sweatshirts when he was a kid. Always trying to be smaller, to be less.

_You were never too much, Ben. And you never could be._

Richie, though. Richie could stand to be a little less. Stan grins to himself as he thinks it, watching and listening as Richie makes a fool of himself to no conceivable end. He's just as loud, just as absurd, just as absolutely infuriating as he was when they were kids, when he and Stan would battle vicious wars of attrition that ended only when Bill finally said _enough_.

Stan's missed him.

He watches them all hug, and touch, and laugh at each other, and if he stands off to the side he can pretend that he's there. That he's just fallen into one of those quiet moments of observing, and they're so caught up in the spark and dynamism of each other that they've forgotten to notice him, just for a moment.

He spots Ben take a step back and fall quiet, with that timid but pleased smile on his face, and Stan wishes he could connect eyes with him from across the room. Wishes he could tell him.

_I know. I understand._

They all take their seats eventually and leave Stan the worst spot at the table—right between Richie and Eddie. It's exactly where he would've ended up sitting if he'd actually been there.

He stares for a while at that empty seat, pulled back from the table like they _know_ , and the sounds of their chatting and catching up fade into the background as he looks at it.

He sits down.

There's something so easy about it—sitting here at the table with them all, even if he can't truly be a part of it. He doesn't talk. It's easier if he doesn't, because then it doesn't feel like he's being ignored. Richie puts his arm on the back of his chair at one point, and if he was really there, Stan would probably roll his eyes, or lean away. But because he isn't, he doesn't even try. He just lets himself pretend that Richie's arm is around him. That he's grudgingly putting up with it and that Richie knows.

It's nice. He can almost feel the warmth of it.

There's a quiet air of confusion to them all, and it seems to make them nervous when they prod at it, like a sore tooth you hope isn't rotten on the inside. Every time the conversation starts to move in a direction that might eventually lead to the reason they're all here, they steer away from it. They barely seem to realize they're doing it, and Stan doesn't quite understand how they can all ignore it so adamantly.

It takes Mike's knowing gaze. His exuberant, but apprehensive smile, for Stan to realize what's going on. They don't know. But Mike does.

_Oh Mike._

He can't really blame him though, can he? Mike has lived his whole life in this hell, suffered it and built himself around and through it. He deserves this. Just a few moments living in a world where none of it ever happened. Where the love they all have for each other wasn't built on pain. Where that's the reason they're here, and not the horror they've lived through once and might not again.

Not to mention if they'd remembered it all right off the bat like he did, maybe more of them wouldn't have made it back…

_But that's not true. Because they're all stronger than you ever were._

Richie makes a comment about Ben's weight and Stan glares at him.

"Beep beep," he says, even though it was (technically) a compliment, because Ben seems somehow more uncomfortable than when Richie made digs about his weight when they were kids. And maybe Stan doesn't completely understand why, but he knows that if he could, he'd be telling Richie to shut the fuck up.

Ben does well enough for himself, though, by turning the topic of conversation.

"Is Stanley coming or what?" he says, and suddenly all of the Losers are looking at him.

He feels his heart thud in his chest, even though he doesn't have one, and for a moment it feels like they are. Then he remembers. They left the spot open between Richie and Eddie because that's where he goes. They're not staring at him, they're staring at his absence.

Either way, it's jarring to turn and see Richie staring at him absently while fumbling over his name. He rolls his eyes when he and Bill look at each other and settle on "Stan Urine."

"No, no," Richie says, laughing. "He's a fucking pussy, he's not gonna show."

If it were anyone else, maybe he would be offended. But it's Richie, and Stan can see the doubt in his eyes. Like he's waiting for Stan to walk in at any moment and prove him wrong. But the thing is, he isn't. He doesn't know how right he is.

Stan's relieved when the conversation moves on, and he can't help but wonder if they're avoiding him the same way they're avoiding It.

The best moments are when it's loud. When they're laughing, or yelling. When Bev pretends to kiss Richie and shoves food in his face instead. When Richie and Eddie are arm-wrestling, and Eddie shouts to distract him. When Eddie and Ben get into a weirdly in-depth conversation about MSG that Eddie tries to goad into an argument. Ben just smiles and shrugs when Eddie contradicts him.

It's in the quiet moments that Stan notices all of the little things that are wrong, all of the things that hurt. The bruises on Bev's wrists. The longing look on Ben's face and the way he seems surprised when anyone knocks or brushes against him. The way Eddie brings up his wife with hollow eyes and changes the subject as soon as he does. The way Mike stays quiet.

Maybe that's why those moments don't last long. Why as soon as the conversation starts to dip, Richie's eyes light up with a new gag, or Eddie tries to prod someone into a fight, or Bev loudly asks about their personal lives from across the table, teasing out new information to toss around and play with.

Even so, they can't keep it up forever, and they're falling into another lull when the fortune cookies come out.

Eddie and Richie are arguing about something stupid, but it's subdued, and Stan doesn't even have to lean back to avoid Richie's leaning in or Eddie's emphatic gestures. Mike is watching them vacantly, going through the motions of giving them an audience, even though Stan's almost certain that he isn't listening to any of it. Ben is outwardly staring at Bev and Bill, the same way he did when they were kids and somehow didn't think the rest of them could see. That same look of wanting and waiting. Loving both of them so much that he'd hold it inside of him until it hurt rather than do anything to get in the way.

It's a testament to how rare it is that everyone's eyes fall on Ben when he gently inserts himself into their conversation.

"I mean it's weird, right?" he says. And suddenly everyone's listening up. Ben stumbles over the sudden attention, but does what he's always done best and pushes through. "Now that we're all here everything just comes back faster and faster…I mean, all of it."

Stan feels it in the air. Feels it when he looks at Mike and sees him grimacing at his plate. Feels it in the blanket of tension that settles over the Losers. The revelry is coming to an end.

"You know when Mike called me, I threw up," Richie throws out, grinning nervously like it's a joke. "Isn't that weird? Like I got nervous. I got sick, and I threw up."

There's silence, then, and if Stan knows Richie, he knows Richie hates silence.

"I feel fine now," he stumbles on, lying through his teeth as far as Stan's concerned. "I'm very relieved to be here with you guys."

Everything about it is wrong. The flat suggestion where a joke should be, the sudden sincerity. If the Richie he knows ever manages to get every eye in the room on him at any given time he _preens_. This Richie glances around nervously and says:

"Why's everybody looking at me like this?"

One by one the Losers come to terms with the fear they felt when Mike called, and while Stan isn't _glad_ that his friends were suddenly ripped out of their lives by a surprise dose of concentrated abject horror, there's a selfish sort of relief in knowing that they felt it too. That it wasn't just Stan who felt the world as he knew it come crashing down around him when Mike Hanlon said "come home."

And now he gets to see, in real time, each of them go through the next stages of it. The denial, the anger, the _I don't want to hear this_ and _let him explain_.

He can't help but hurt for Mike as he tries to do just that. It's not his fault that it hurts. That the human mind puts up walls to keep itself safe. That doing this, being here, is taking a sledgehammer (a baseball bat, a fencepost-javelin) to those walls and letting every rancid horror spill through and sink teeth into _right_ and _good_.

Stan understands. He really does. He felt everything that they're feeling now in one concentrated burst. And maybe it's better this way (he hopes beyond hope that it's better this way) to have the pain spread out over time. Maybe it's just too much to comprehend, and that's why they're lashing out like this. Maybe that's why he took the path he did, and they're all sitting here together.

_No. They would have made it back. They're strong._

Mike says his piece. Explains that It is alive and killing again, just like they all knew but didn't want to believe. He reminds them of the oath they swore and tells them that they've fulfilled it just by being here today, but that if there's any chance of killing It, it lies with the seven of them.

"Well that shit got dark fast," Richie says. "Thanks, Mike."

Eddie opens his fortune cookie.

"My fortune just says 'Could.'"

Stan watches the chaos unfold in slow motion. As soon as _Guess Cut Not Could It_ is on the table, he knows what Bev's fortune says. He sits, sober, as the Losers scramble to piece together the message. When Bev finally places hers on the table, tears streaming silently down her face, he closes his eyes.

"Why does it say Stanley?" Eddie says, but his voice is hollow like he knows the answer.

The table shakes.

Stan opens his eyes to see the fortune cookies rattling. There's a bang as every Loser still sitting pushes back in their chair that he thinks originates either from Ben grabbing the table or Richie knocking against it with his knee in a mad scramble to _get back_.

Stan stays where he is, watching grimly as a fortune cookie leaps out of the bowl in front of Eddie. Stan knows it can't hurt him—nothing can anymore. Even so, when the cookie begins to quiver and crack, when a huge bug, yellow-brown and chitinous, pushes out, like hatching from an egg, a wave of revulsion spreads through him that sinks so deep that it doesn't matter that he can't be killed again. There are worse things.

"What the fuck is that, man?" Richie says, standing now, and Stan almost laughs from the sheer exasperation he says it with.

The bug crawls towards Eddie, who wheezes weakly, apparently frozen in place.

Three more cookies leap out of the bowl in front of Mike, Bill, Richie.

All three start to hatch at once. Mike stares in horror as something soft and wet sloughs out—a fetal bird with a soft twitching beak, soaking in a pool of embryonic fluid that spills across the table.

 _Underdone,_ Stan thinks hysterically.

A fly pushes out of Bill's, huge and hairy and buzzing. Its wings are too weak for its engorged body, and it only manages to lift itself a few inches off of the table at a time before crashing on its side, scrabbling furiously to push itself upright before taking off into the same lilting flight again.

Richie shrieks when an eye crawls out of the table in front of him, optic nerves acting as long, thrashing tentacles, propelling it forward.

"That fortune cookie's looking at me!" he shouts, scrambling back towards the wall.

Two more leap out. One for Ben, one for Bev. The rest of them barely notice, too caught up in the welcome back gifts It picked out just for them, but Ben's eyes widen like saucers as a handful of bloody teeth roll out on the table towards him.

Bev's cookie just pulses.

"Shut up!" Bill hisses suddenly, and somehow it cuts through the chaos and freezes them all in place. For a moment the only sounds in the room are the dying chirps of the cricket, the buzzing of the fly and the squelching of the eyeball, dragging itself slowly across the table.

Stan can hear footsteps approaching, the solid click of heels.

Bill's fly lurches towards Eddie, and he scrambles to grab on to Ben.

"I don't want to be here, I don't want to be here," he moans.

Bill locks eyes with Ben and he nods, wrapping one arm around Eddie's shoulder and pushing his other hand over Eddie's mouth. Eddie grabs on to it, but doesn't try to wrench it away, eyes wide.

"Everyone, pull up to the table," Bill says, dropping back into his seat and doing just that. Stan spots the sick look on his face when it brings him closer to the lumbering fly, but his face is set in determination.

Mike pulls his chair forward, then Bev, even though the cookie in front of her still pulses like an unruptured boil. Richie comes back to the table. Ben slowly lets go of Eddie. He grips the back of his chair with pale, straining knuckles, but stays quiet.

The waitress comes back into the room, looking concerned. She glances around at them, at their pallid faces, and tense, bated breath.

"Is everything alright?" she asks in confusion. She can't see the horrible things scattered, flitting, oozing across the table, just like Bev's father couldn't see the blood.

Bev's cookie pulses.

"Yeah, sorry," Bill says, face pulled grim and pale, but voice steady. "We're old friends. Just a joke taken too far."

Stan sees her take a look around for some evidence of such a joke, and seeing none, fixes Bill with a confused smile.

Bev's cookie suddenly bursts in a spurt of blood. She flinches, but doesn't gasp.

"Could we get the check, please?" Richie says, distracting the waitress's gaze towards him.

"Of course," she says, smiling politely. "I'll be right back with that."

The things on the table are moving slowly now, or not at all. Only the eyeball squirms across the hard wood, scraping now as it runs out of slick. Bill's fly kicks furiously on its side. He drops his napkin over it as soon as the waitress's back is turned.

The instant she's out of sight, Bev shudders and Richie lurches forward, hand pressed over his mouth. Stan goes to put his hand on Richie's shoulder, but suddenly finds himself afraid that it will go right through. He pulls away quickly as Richie shakes.

"You alright, Rich?" Bill asks. Bev does what Stan couldn't and puts her hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah, yeah," he says, turning away from her. "Just…"

He lurches forward once again, this time directly towards Stan, hand pressed firmly against his mouth. Stan finally stands up and puts some distance between him and Richie. He'll hold strong in the face of Its nasty tricks, but getting thrown up _through_ is where he draws the line. He hears Eddie do the same behind him.

Impressively, Richie manages to keep it together with Bev rubbing gently at his back and his eyes firmly fixed away from the table.

"Why don't I pay the bill on the way out?" Bill says.

Nobody argues.

°°°

Bill pays, Richie freaks out a kid, Eddie says "Stanley's probably fine."

Bev calls Patty in the parking lot.

And Stan doesn't want this. He doesn't want to hear her in the wake of what he's done. But he _has to_. Because she didn't ask for this. God, if he'd known, he never would have married her. He never would have _spoken_ to her. Because Patty is good. Patty is love and light and everything right with the world. And she doesn't deserve this. She doesn't deserve him.

"He passed," she says on the phone, and Stan can feel ghost tears roll down his face, as hot and pressing as if they were real. She sobs quietly, and he closes his eyes and listens.

When she finally hangs up, Stan feels light in a way he hasn't since he appeared in Derry. Vaporous. Untethered.

It takes Richie and Eddie arguing with Mike to bring him back.

It's more like arguing _at_ Mike, if he's being honest, and when Richie says "You lied to us," Stan is grounded with a sudden sharp spike of anger.

"He didn't lie," Stan says, unthinking, angry. "You're not supposed to know all at once. This is what happens if you know all at once."

Richie goes still, and for a delirious instant, Stan wonders if he heard him. But Richie just turns and walks back to his car. Eddie is quick to follow suit, and Mike watches them with resignation.

Bev and Ben are next, heading back to the Townhouse, though at least they don't seem set on leaving Derry just yet.

Part of Stan wants them to leave. To take the scraps of memories they've gathered and _get out_ while they still can. But he also sees the look of determination on Mike's face and knows that he's going after It either way. And they've always been stronger together.

"Bill," Mike says, when it's only the two of them left.

"I'm sorry, Mikey," Bill says, and Stan feels his stomach sink. If Bill walks away, there's no chance. And Bill has to see it. He has to see that Mike isn't going to give up on this. That if he leaves, he's leaving Mike to die.

"Let me show you something," Mike says, quietly. "Then, if you want to go, you can go. Just. Let me show you."

Bill studies him, and Stan wonders if he sees it. If he does, he doesn't give any indication. But he nods. The look of relief on Mike's face is overwhelming.

Stan follows Mike and Bill to the library.

°°°

Mike's loft is cluttered in a way that makes Stan shudder. Even so, a wave of fondness rolls over him as he scans over the maps and articles pinned to the walls, the books stacked waist high on the floor, and the papers covering his desk. He sees it in Bill's face too as he looks around while Mike picks through the mess in search of something.

When Mike surfaces, he's holding a book. He tips it open, and even without anything marking the page it seems to land right where he wants it to. It must be a page he's opened to countless times before. He smooths his palm across the inside of the spine, absentmindedly.

Stan sees him hesitate before he passes it to Bill.

"The Ritual of Chüd," Bill reads. He immediately reels back, snapping the book shut and pressing the heel of his palm to his head.

"Sorry, sorry," Mike apologizes, frantically taking the book back. "It's not good to remember so quickly I just— I needed you to know that I have a plan. That we _had_ a plan."

"Mike," Bill says, and when Stan looks over…is his nose bleeding?

"We're not going into this blind," Mike says. "We've done it before. We _hurt_ It. I really think we almost killed It. We _can_ kill It, we just—"

He cuts himself off and stares at the closed cover of the book in his hands. Despite all he's said, all he's saying…in this moment he suddenly seems desperate. Unsure.

Bill stares at him, unreadable, still a little dazed.

"Grab Its tongue," he says quietly. "Bite down."

Mike looks up at him, hesitantly.

"D-don't let guh-go," Bill finishes.

Stan can see it, the flash of determination in his eye from when he was a boy.

_It got Georgie. I'm gonna kill It._

"W-we'll kill It," he says, like it's simple. And in that moment, it is.

Stan looks to Mike and sees an expression on his face that he knows was on his own just a moment ago, looking to Bill again after all of these years.

Reverence.

°°°

Back at the Townhouse, the scene is more subdued than expected. Come to think of it, Stan's not sure exactly what he expected, maybe Richie and Eddie having it out with Ben and Bev. Maybe Eddie panicking, Richie vomiting, Bev rolling her eyes as Ben runs between them with assurances.

He didn't expect to find Bev crying and the rest of them watching her with various expressions of horror, disbelief, and (on Ben's part) solemn understanding.

"I've seen every single one of us as we—" she's saying as they walk in.

"Seen every single one of us what?" Bill asks, gentle but pressing as he steps into the room.

She turns to him, and Stan can't see her face from this angle as he comes up behind Mike. She's just a shock of red hair and a fluttering voice that sounds too fragile to belong to Beverly Marsh.

"The place that Stanley wound up," she says. "That's how we all end."

Stan feels cold. He hates hearing them say his name more than anything. Wishes that if he really has to stand by and witness all of this, they would just forget him.

 _That wouldn't happen,_ he wants to assure them. _You're not like me. You're strong. You're all so strong._

"How come the rest of us aren't seeing this shit?" Richie demands. "What makes her so different?"

 _Only virgins,_ Stan thinks, nonsensically.

"The deadlights," Mike says, like an epiphany.

"The d-deadlights," Bill gasps, stumbling. A vacant look takes over his face that reminds Stan eerily of a time, so many years ago, in the sewers underneath Derry.

He's remembering.

"She was c-c-caught in the deadlights that day," he says.

"So were you!" Eddie cuts in, a wild look on his face. "I remember, I saw—"

"That was d-different," Bill says, suddenly sure.

"How—" Eddie demands.

"It just is," Bill snaps, and Eddie goes quiet. Bill looks over at him, the chastened look on his face, and softens. "W-was. It's the d-difference between diving in and…f-floating on the surface. Face down."

There's quiet as everyone considers this. Beverly looks vacant, catatonic almost, as she remembers. And Stan can't help the desire to nudge her, to call her name and bring her out of it. Ben seems to be thinking something similar. He's watching her, and as he catches himself leaning towards her and freezes, Stan wonders if he's remembering what he did to draw her out of a similar state once upon a time. Mike, Richie, and Eddie are all watching Bill intently. Mike with serious contemplation that borders on ferocity, Richie in stark disbelief and growing frustration, and Eddie with a thinly veiled amalgam of fear and awe.

"That— You do know that means literally nothing, right Bill?" Richie says, cutting. All eyes land on him, but he stares deliberately at Bill. "None of this makes any fucking sense and we're fucking idiots if we pretend to understand the first thing about it."

"We don't need to," Mike says, and Stan is surprised to hear some of that same desperation from earlier in his voice again. "That's not the point. It. It affects us differently. It always has."

_Mike's bird. Eddie's leper. Ben's mummy. Bev's blood. Bill's brother. Stan's corpses. Richie's…what did Richie see again?_

_Maybe that's why he doesn't understand._

Even so, he surprises Stan and seems to go quiet, letting Mike gather his thoughts for a moment.

"We were all touched by it, changed," he says, directly to Richie. And Stan remembers the way Richie would sometimes be caught in rapt attention when Mike was the one telling the story. "Deep down. Like an infection, or a virus."

Eddie's eyes go wide, and Stan wouldn't have caught it, except that he cuts across the room suddenly. For a moment, Stan's afraid that he's going to walk out. He wants to grab his arm and hold him there, just long enough to let him know that he understands.

He doesn't leave though, just goes to stand by Bill, behind Bev, who's lighting a cigarette. Ben moves to sit down next to her.

Mike's eyes follow Eddie, but he pushes through, explaining directly to Richie, knowing that the rest of them are listening.

"It's been growing for 27 years," he says, urgently. "This whole time, metastasizing. It just got to Stan first because—"

"He was the weakest," Richie says, like defeat.

Stan stares at him. Stung, but grateful. Because Richie understands. At least, in all of this, Richie won't blame himself. Not like the rest of them. Not like Patty.

_I'll explain, I promise. When all of this is over, you'll understand._

"Jesus Christ, Rich," Bill says, and Stan doesn't want to look at him. Doesn't want to watch him try to defend him.

"Just saying what everyone else is thinking, man."

"I mean Rich, come on."

"What Beverly sees, it will come to pass, eventually. Unless we stop It," Mike says, determined and sure.

And Stan trusts Mike more than anything, but he's not sure he believes this. Because it wasn't It that made him do what he did. Not entirely at least. He thought about it. He laid down the cards every way he could think and knew that this was the only option. That this was the only way he could _escape_ while keeping the rest of them safe. If It wanted him dead, It wouldn't have wanted it this way. Because when Stan was holding the blade in his hands, when he was pushing past the pain and wrongness, when he was sitting in warmth and copper and fading light, he wasn't afraid.

He wasn't afraid. But they are. It's using him to make them afraid.

Stan wants to scream. To tell them that they're playing right into Its claws. But what can he do? He isn't real. And he knows deep down that even if they knew, they would fight anyway.

_Losers stick together._

"How the hell are we supposed to do that?" Eddie asks, exasperated.

Mike looks at him, then the rest of them, evaluating.

"The Ritual of Chüd," he says slowly.

None of them reel back, none of them bleed, like Bill did. But Stan can see the shock and remembrance on their faces.

"That's how we hurt It before," Mike says. "That's how we'll kill It."

"The Ritual of…are you fucking kidding me, man?" Richie says, confusion transforming to bitter vindication. He laughs. "That didn't even _work_ last time! Obviously, or we wouldn't be here right now!"

"It'll work," Bill says, a little distant, but absolutely certain.

Richie opens his mouth and Stan can see the argument, the fear, the frustration ready to tumble out. Bill's attention snaps to him before it can.

"R-Richie," he says, and Richie freezes. "It'll work."

Richie gapes for a moment, closes and opens his mouth like a fish, then finally settles on closed, a stormy look in his eyes. Stan remembers a thirteen year old boy, too bobble-headed and wiry, too smart and sharp-tongued for his own good, knocked to the ground over and over again by everything and everyone bigger than him. He remembers that dark look, the final straw, when he was lying on the pavement and the one who put him there, the one standing over him was his _friend_.

Richie is silent, and Stan wonders if he remembers too.

"So what do we do?" Ben asks, eyes on Mike.

Mike looks at them, thinks. Nods to himself.

"We have to remember."

°°°

Stan doesn't sleep. There's nothing about his spectral body that indicates that he's tired, but he is. So, so tired. It's a fatigue buried deep that seems to drop on him suddenly as all of the Losers split off to bed, promising to reconvene in the morning. He sits down in an armchair, palms resting on his legs. He knows he can't sleep, but he closes his eyes anyway, trying to let his mind rest. It strikes him as odd that closing his eyes blocks out anything. When he looks down at his hands, they're translucent, and he can make out the paisley pattern of the carpet through them. So why wouldn't his eyelids do the same?

He moves his eyes slowly, behind his closed eyelids, and finds that what he thought was merely an impression of the room in his memory moves with them. The more he focuses, the more he finds he _can_ see the room. Vague and foggy, like looking through frosted glass.

There's an inherent wrongness about it. About having his eyes closed and seeing anyway. It reminds him of nightmares he's had, where something horrible is happening right in front of him, but no matter how hard he tries, he can't not see it. Somehow, though, it doesn't bother him. Not like he thinks it should. Rather, he thinks of opening his eyes under water and looking at the world above him through a layer of shimmering refraction. Protected, despite the growing danger of staying down too long. Safe.

He feels…insubstantial. Not like he did when he heard Patty's voice, or when was nowhere and didn't have a body of any kind. He doesn't feel like he's about to float away, just that he's shimmered out of focus. There, but not quite. Fuzzy around the edges.

He drifts.

Time is…difficult right now. Stan couldn't tell you what time the Losers arrived in Derry. How long they spent in that restaurant. How long ago they split, then gathered again, seven magnetic poles (six) drawn together in the lobby of the Derry Townhouse Inn. He certainly couldn't tell you how much time passed between his death and subsequent arrival in Derry. He doesn't even know if time _counted_ in a place like that.

Even so, he's still surprised to hear footsteps so soon after everyone went to bed.

 _Someone can't sleep,_ he thinks idly, before opening his eyes slowly and finding the room lit up with morning light.

Huh.

He's still tired. He thinks he always will be for as long as he's holding on like this, but the edge of it is smoothed over at least.

The quiet footsteps that drew him out of that odd fluid state belong to Ben. Stan can see him standing at the bottom of the stairs through the entryway that leads from the foyer into the lounge. He grips the banister and gazes out somewhere towards the windows, contemplating. It's the quiet sort of look that Stan remembers overtaking him when he was sketching out houses and structures idly on scraps of paper in the clubhouse, surrounded on all six sides by security of his own creation.

He stands there for another moment, then seems to redirect and starts towards Stan, making his way through to the lounge with footsteps so quiet Stan is surprised he heard them in the first place.

He sits down on the sofa and settles comfortably back against the cushions, hands laced together and resting. His head turns to look out towards the windows, lost in thought, and Stan is caught again by that same voyeuristic feeling as when Eddie, Mike, and Bill saw each other for the first time. The feeling that he's seeing something that was never meant to be seen.

So he looks away, giving Ben privacy as best as he can without leaving. Somehow he doesn't think Ben would mind him selfishly indulging in the quiet company.

It's a while before anyone else is up, and when someone else finally does stumble into the lounge, Stan is surprised to look up and see Richie.

He's bleary, hair a wild mess, and he's wearing the same jeans from yesterday and a gray T-shirt so wrinkled that he must have slept in it. His movements are sluggish and loping, and he makes a beeline for the bar without so much as glancing at Ben. Ben follows him with his eyes.

"Starting the morning off right?" Ben says, watching Richie as he fumbles to pour himself a drink.

"Jesus fuck!" He jumps out of his skin, spilling what looks like whiskey all over the bar and barely catching the bottle before he drops it and makes the situation worse. For a split second he's wired tense, then he looks up and becomes boneless. "Christ, Ben. Warn a guy."

"Sorry," Ben says, sounding not very sorry. Anyone else and he might have been, but Richie's a special case (ha), and not even Ben is immune to the seductive draw of fucking with Richie Tozier. It helps that he always gives as good as he gets and seems to revel in both.

"Fuck," Richie says, ducking down behind the bar for something and coming up with a dish cloth. He uses it to soak up the spilled alcohol (thankfully not that much) and leaves it crumpled on the counter. Stan frowns. "I'm already in for enough jump scares with the whole demon-clown-monster-from-hell situation, I don't need the ghost of fucking Joe Kidd waiting behind corners for me too."

Ben gives him an odd look, like he’s puzzled why Richie would call him that.

_It's the boots, Ben. The brown boots, and the heavy jacket, and the layers. You've got a bit of a thing going._

"Western fan?" he asks instead.

Richie snorts, twisting the cap back on the whiskey without successfully pouring himself a drink.

"I spent my formative years with William Denbrough," Richie says, leaning on the bar and shoving a hand beneath his glasses to rub tiredly at his eye. "If it's got Clint Eastwood in it, I've seen it."

Ben smiles, reminiscent. Stan wonders what he's remembering. The _Silvarado_ poster plastered on Bill's bedroom wall, or the _Lone Ranger_ action figures lined up on his bookshelf. The hardest stride of Bill's cowboy phase was hit before Ben's time, when they were ten or eleven and Bill took an indelible marker to his rickety monster of a bike, but the signs of it were still there throughout his teen years.

"Fuck," Richie says, leaning forward heavily with his head in his hands. "I'm so hungover."

"I'm surprised you're awake," Ben admits.

"Why? What time is it?" Richie asks, letting his hands fall away from his face to stare blearily at Ben.

Ben checks his phone.

"Quarter to seven?" he says with a shrug.

Richie looks confused, then at the windows like he’s only just noticing the morning light pouring through.

"Huh," he says.

"Not usually a morning person I take it," Ben says.

Richie shakes his head absently.

"No, it’s just." He's still staring at the windows. "Slept longer than I thought."

He shakes his head a little, like he’s clearing the thought, then comes around the bar. He holds his hand to his mouth like a radio.

" _Kchzz_. _Captain Tozier to Ground Agent Hanscom. Prepare the landing pad, this one's coming in hot_."

Even hung over and half-dead on his feet, Stan has to admit that Richie's Voices have come a long way since they were kids. It's almost eerie, suddenly hearing a completely different person come out of him. It doesn't necessarily mean that what he's saying is any more comprehensible, though.

Ben seems equally confused, but that doesn't stop Richie from picking his way around to the sofa and landing on it heavily, swinging his socked feet up into Ben's lap.

"Was that…supposed to be funny?" Ben asks, smile quirking on his face.

"Cut me some slack Haystack," Richie says, lying back against the arm of the sofa. "I can't be spinning gold twenty-four fucking sev, the comedy economy would collapse."

"Funny, I heard you weren't actually spinning these days."

"Wow, fucking eviscerate me I guess."

He wedges one hand behind his head, then digs his phone out of his pocket with the other and starts scrolling through it. Ben checks something on his own, one hand resting idly on Richie's ankle.

There's something strange about seeing his childhood friends casually interacting with modern technology. It's not that Stan didn't (he wasn't one to post much, but he was a frequenter of a few birding Facebook groups), but it feels like two separate worlds, and seeing one cross over into the other is uncanny. It also makes him wonder if, had they been a _normal_ friend group that hadn't been wiped from each other's live by a solid dose of trauma-induced amnesia, they would have found each other online some years back. Would they just have been Facebook friends? Distant witnesses to each other's lives? Photos of spouses and vacations and babies, and a few sentences of hollow commentary? Or would they have really been friends? The kind that hold pieces of each other inside themselves. The kind Stan's only really found in Patty since he left Derry a lifetime ago. Family.

Richie falls asleep within five minutes, and Stan only notices because he snores _once_ , loudly, then falls into a heavy rhythm of breathing. Ben looks at him fondly. His glasses are still on, visibly smudged, and his phone is loose in his hand, resting screen-down on his chest. Ben watches him breathe for a moment, deep settling breaths that inflate and collapse his whole body.

A little while later (Stan's not sure how long. Time is still strange, but it doesn't _seem_ to be that long) Ben gets a phone call. He's quick to pick it up, glancing at Richie as he does to see if it woke him. It didn't.

"Hey, Mike," he says quietly, still watching Richie for signs of life. He breathes heavily, very clearly alive but also very clearly not awake.

 _"Hey man,"_ Stan can hear Mike say through the phone. _"Did I wake you up?"_

"No, I've been up for a while," Ben says. "What's up?"

_"Just checking in. I tried Bill, but he didn't pick up. I'm guessing he's still asleep."_

"Yeah, it's just me and Richie so far. As far as I know, at least."

_"Richie?"_

Ben smiles. His hand is still resting on Richie's ankle.

"Well, sort of."

_"Okay. Well, no rush. Just let me know when you guys are ready to go. The more daylight we have, the better, but I'd rather everyone get enough sleep than push it."_

"Sounds good," Ben says. "Are you coming by, or are you gonna meet us there?"

 _"I'll meet you. There are a few things I want to double check first. Not that I don't know what we're doing. I do, it's just_ —"

"Mikey."

_"Yeah?"_

"We can do this."

Stan can hear a sigh, heavy and all-encompassing, through the tinny speaker.

_"Yeah."_

"See you soon, man."

_"Yeah. See you, Benny."_

The rest of the Losers make their way downstairs not too long after that. First Eddie, then Bill, then Bev.

Richie wakes up with a start when Eddie comes downstairs and starts immediately (and loudly) complaining about the lack of water pressure and what that says about corrosion in the pipes and lead buildup and "building codes exist for a _reason_."

Ben tells him it's just as likely that the valves aren't opening properly and Eddie gives him a look so scandalized that he immediately drops it.

Stan is somewhat surprised that they're all awake and ready to go before nine, given the copious amounts of alcohol that were consumed last night, but none of them mention it. Richie doesn't even complain about being hungover, after his nap. He just sleepily goes back upstairs to get shoes ("Do you have _any_ idea how filthy carpet gets? And you're walking around in _socks_?") and apparently throw on _the same shirt as yesterday_ (Stan wonders if he's always like this, or if being in Derry has reverted his hygiene habits as well as his sense of humor to what they were when he was a teenager) and they're all out by five-after. Stan wonders if they're operating on some subconscious instinct to _get it all over with_. Rip off the band-aid. Or if they're awake and startlingly lucid because they're _meant_ to be, which seems to be the principle reality has always operated under for them in this town.

The barrens are just how Stan remembers them, scrappy, and filthy, and somehow _quiet_ even when the street is on the other side of just a couple of trees. The litter on the outskirts is a little more modern (what the fuck is _La Croix_?) but as they go deeper, Richie spots a half-buried can of Slice that Eddie has to drag him away from trying to dig up. ("It's a cultural relic!" "You'll get tetanus, asshole!")

Stan knows where they're going, knew as soon as Mike said "meet at the Barrens," but the rest of the Losers seem surprised. It makes him smile, the joy they light up with when they remember the clubhouse. Ben's clubhouse.

It should feel like a tomb down there. The remnants of their childhood buried deep bellow the ground. But coming down the ladder after the rest of them have filed down and seeing them all scattered around, touching the walls, and picking up relics that somehow don't crumble in their hands, it feels like walking backwards through time. Perfectly preserved.

Stan spots what looks like a wasp nest tucked into a corner and hopes, for their sake, that it's not active.

Maybe not perfectly preserved.

Bill finds the old coffee can full of hairnets and Stan smiles as the Losers tense while he opens it. His smile fades when Bill pulls one out and the tension spills over into something else and suddenly everyone is

"sad," Beverly says quietly, and Stan remembers what she said to him that day.

"I'm sorry Bev," Stan says, choking on the words, but feeling like he has to say them anyway.

They start talking about him, and he doesn't want to listen. It's not like it was with Patty, where he felt like he was going to float away. Instead, he feels heavy. His eyes burn until hot tears run down his face and _why can he cry like this? What purpose do ghost tears serve?_ And his fists clench tight against the overwhelming urge to press his hands over his ears. He wants to sink deeper into the ground, but he can't, so he stays where he is, and he listens. And all he is is grief.

_I love you. That's why. You have to understand. That was why._

He's more relieved than he could ever say when the topic of conversation moves back to Pennywise. And isn't that funny? Because once upon a time, It was the topic he dreaded more than anything. There's a cruel sort of righteousness in finally finding something he wants to hear about even _less_.

 _I beat It,_ he thinks, choking out a bitter laugh.

Mike tells them they need to split up. Walk the same paths that they did when they were children and remember for themselves what it felt like to be them. He encourages them to find something, a token, he calls it. Something that mattered to them. Something to fight, or worth fighting for. They need to be in the same mindset they were back then if they want to have any chance of defeating It. The odds are already skewed against them, he says, without Stan. And while Stan doesn't fully believe that's true ( _that's why he did it, isn't it? to give them better odds?_ ) he still closes his eyes guiltily.

So they peel off, one by one, until it's just Richie and Mike left in the club house. Mike grabs Richie's arm as he starts for the stairs, stopping him before he can leave.

"Do you remember?" Mike says, quietly. "What we saw that day?"

Richie looks at him blankly, but Stan knows he's puzzling beneath the flat look.

"The…the smoke," he says slowly.

Mike nods, hesitantly, and Stan can see the cautious way he's studying Richie, like he's about to reel back in pain, nose bleeding.

He doesn't, but after a moment of staring down at where Mike's fingers wrap over his wrist, he goes sheet white.

"It's an alien," he says, then looks up, eyes wide. "Holy fuck, aliens are real!"

Mike nods solemnly, and Richie just stares at him. Then he bursts into laughter.

"What the fuck, man?" he says, through hysterical peals. "This is…what the fuck?"

Mike lets him go, still watching him carefully, but apparently can't help the crack of a smile that appears at the corner of his mouth.

"You alright, Rich?" he says, fondness in his eyes.

Richie wipes tears away from his eyes, and Stan remembers him doing that when they were kids, laughing so hard he cried. This time, he's not so sure the tears are truly from mirth, but it's always been easier for Richie to hide behind a grin.

"Yeah man, I'm thrilled," he says, and he turns to start up the ladder, shouting as he does. "Aliens fucking exist!"

Mike laughs, surprised, and so, so, real.

Stan's not sure what to do while they go on their respective journeys of rediscovery. They're splitting off six ways, and even if he could pick one friend to tag along with, he doesn't think it would be right. Mike said they might see…things, and while they've all talked about their experiences with It, details were never asked for nor offered. He doesn't want to see anything they don't want seen.

He thinks about hanging out in the clubhouse for a while, but as Mike finally starts up the ladder, he realizes that he doesn't want to be down here without them. He thinks it really would feel like a tomb, alone and underground in the dark. He slips out behind Mike and tries not to think about what's happening to his body right now all the way in Atlanta. If it's already underground.

Mike closes the trapdoor and Stan watches him as he starts off through the Barrens.

Stan waits a while in the clearing. It's nice and bright, and if he focuses he thinks he can feel the sunlight and its gentle warmth. He can hear the twittering call of a chimney swift and, if he listens closely, the more distant coo of a mourning dove.

It sounds like childhood.

He stands there for a good while with his eyes closed, listening, feeling, pretending to breathe.

Then he sighs, opens his eyes, and starts walking.

°°°

Stan knows Derry's always been small, intellectually, but it still surprises him how quickly he finds himself in Memorial Park. Just head directly out of the Barrens from the clubhouse and bam, there it is. Right on the other side of Kansas street. He crosses with the same care he always has, look both ways, move quickly, and it isn't until he's on the other side that he finally catches himself and laughs. A ghost cautious of getting hit by a car. That's a new one.

The park isn't empty, of course it isn't. It's summer. Memorial Park was never popular with kids when Stan was one, no playground, not enough trees to climb, but there are some folk scattered about. A kid tossing a softball with her dad, two older teens, or young adults (it's hard to tell) having a picnic. An older woman sitting on a bench.

He spots a group of young teenagers gathered together on the grass. Three boys and two girls, though the longer Stan looks, the less sure he is about one of each. They're close together, layered. Legs on laps and leaning against each other. Maybe it's just that being here puts them in his mind, but they remind him, nonsensically, of birds. The tall skinny one in a black hoodie, despite the weather, is a hooded oriole. The sleepy looking boy leaning back on his elbows is a common kestrel. Then there, next to him, is an American goldfinch, scrolling through her phone. She's leaning against a boy with curly black hair and a bright red t-shirt, and he's a cardinal. And then there, lying in the grass with their legs crossed over his, is a tiny house sparrow.

He doesn't mean to watch them. It's strange, he knows, but he doesn't want to look away.

The oriole springs to their feet, suddenly, all gangly limbs and nervous energy that reminds Stan instantly of Richie. Funnily enough, they're one of the only two kids in the group who _isn't_ wearing glasses.

"Phone pile!" they declare, suddenly, digging a cellphone out of their pocket and dropping it in the grass in the middle of the circle. The rest of the group is suddenly sparked into motion, pulling out their own phones and stacking them ceremoniously on top of each other. Three of the five partake in this ritual enthusiastically. The sleepy kestrel rolls his eyes, but smiles, and does the same. Only the goldfinch holds onto her phone, typing something.

"Phones go in the phone pile!" the oriole demands, lunging towards the goldfinch, who twists out of range.

"Hey!" she says, "Just let me finish—"

"Phone pile! Phone pile! Phone pile!"

They lunge again, and manage to grab it this time. The goldfinch shrieks in protest, but she's also laughing.

"Charlie!" she yells, jumping to her feet while Charlie the oriole runs away with it, towards some bushes on the outskirts of the park.

The goldfinch is fast, faster than the oriole, but between their longer limbs and head-start, they manage to reach the edge first and drop the phone somewhere in the shrubbery.

Or, pretends to, Stan realizes as the oriole slinks back to the nest, leaving the goldfinch to dig around in frustration. They still have it in their hand when they return to the group, and pass it off casually to the tiny sparrow, who takes it without blinking and slips it into their own back pocket before standing up, innocent as a lamb, and going to help the goldfinch search.

The cardinal grins widely, and the kestrel just shakes his head, laughing under his breath.

 _Stay together,_ Stan thinks, watching the kids tease and play. _You're safer this way. Better._

The birdbath is within sight, and he heads towards it. There isn't a lot of activity, likely in part thanks to the noise the kids are making, just two black-capped chickadees, pecking in the water. He wonders idly if they would know he's there. If he could get as close as he liked without disturbing them. Finally silent and invisible, the perfect birder. He doesn't, though. There's something that feels wrong about it, invasive. So he watches them flit together for a long moment, from a distance.

Then he starts towards the standpipe.

Part of him expected it to seem smaller than it used to, but it still pushes against the sky, stark white and imposing. He walks the perimeter of it, tracing the gray stone at the base with his eyes. People have shoved cigarettes into the cracks.

When he comes around to the entrance, he's selfishly relieved to find it closed. Selfish, because something tells him that if he really were there, if he weren't just a spirit lingering on earth too long, the door would swing slowly open, the way it did so many years ago.

Even so, he needs to go inside, so he resolves to try something he hasn't tested yet.

He's a ghost, right? And ghosts are supposed to be able to walk through walls.

He places his hand gently on the heavy door, and he can feel it beneath his finger tips: rough, chipping paint over old wood. It's solid, it's there. He pushes past it.

It's not as disconcerting as it should be, he thinks, to see his hand disappear through the door. He's insubstantial. Not made of cells, or air, or particles of anything. Not even light. Of course he can pass through solid objects.

He doesn't feel the inside the door, just a weight where his wrist is immersed in it, and the cool drafty air on the other side. He inhales and exhales in a convincing facsimile of breathing, closes his eyes, and steps through.

When all of him is on the other side, he opens his eyes slowly, a faint dusty taste in the back of his throat. It's quiet inside. Drafty, and holding onto the coolness of the night while the sun slowly heats it from the outside. There is no carnival, no calliope, just the scent of rusting pipes and ancient water.

He starts up the stairs, spiraling slowly around the edge of the building. His footsteps don't sound, but he can feel the uneven wooden stairs beneath his feet. Can almost hear the deep creaking sound they would be making if he actually had any weight to put on them. Light spills in through the windows. Warmth seeps in from the exterior wall, while cold radiates from the vast metal expanse of the storage tank.

The stairs seem endless, even now. It's funny, Stan thinks, that it surprises him. That coming back to Derry _didn't_ magically make everything smaller than he thought it was when he was a kid. Some things, it seems, are as big as they were back then. As huge, and imposing, and terrifying as ever.

When he finally makes it to the top, he feels a sudden burst of fear that he can't control. He grips the handrail tightly and stares up into the rafters, unwilling to look down into the basin and find it full of murky water and floating corpses. Dead children that sing.

He doesn't hear any singing. Doesn't hear water, or music, or screaming laughter. So he looks down.

The basin is empty.

He stares into it, and heights have always made him a little woozy, but he finds he doesn't mind so much as he sways. He thinks, vaguely, that this must be what looking into a black hole feels like. Just, a huge emptiness, cavernous and gaping and ready to pull anything in. To fill up the overwhelming _lack_. He starts to think about the place he went after he died, before Derry, and has to take a step back. As he turns and starts back down the stairs, he mutters quietly to himself:

"Robin, bluejay, cardinal, sparrow, egret, oriole, cowbird…"

°°°

It's clear, when he gets back to the Townhouse, that his walking tour was the most uneventful of the bunch. He feels a surge of guilt every time one of them bursts in, shaken, dirty, hurt. They're all reliving the worst experiences of their lives, and he just took a stroll through a park.

It's hard to keep track of them. Ben and Beverly try to keep them all together, but with Bill being as slippery as the rest of them, it's an impossible task.

There's nothing he can do to help them, so he stands by. Something in his bone marrow says _don't you go running off too. It's safer if you stick together._ So he does. As they split apart and find each other and pick up and lose pieces of themselves along the way, he stays at the nucleus of it, willing them all to come back whole, or something close to it.

And when they're finally all back together again, they're standing on the steps of the house on Neibolt street, just like they were 27 years ago. Except this time Bills not telling them to go in. He's telling them to stay out. And Stan knows that it doesn't count for him. That nothing in that house can hurt him anymore. But that doesn't matter, because it was never the pain that Stan was afraid of.

He watches, helpless, as the Losers rally. And he _knows_ that this was always going to happen. That it _has_ to happen. But that doesn't make it hurt any less. Watching each one of them walk into that house feels watching loose pieces of his soul slip away through a grating. Lost. Gone.

And if a God exists, if it really is a great big turtle the size of everything, and just as incomprehensible, he curses it. For deciding that _these_ are the people who have to walk to the gallows and beat the rope that binds them. For making him stand by and watch.

He watches them slip away like stars blinking out.

_Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…_

Stan follows them inside.

_Zero._

°°°

The house is just as horrible as he remembers it, and if it weren't for the demon magic that he knows is keeping it together, he'd be surprised that it's still standing at all. He doesn't have to be Ben to know that a building like this should have come crashing down a long time ago; he doesn't have to be Eddie to know that it should have been taken down long before that. For a moment, that's all it is to him. A risk to wandering children, and bored teens. Rotting rafters and rusted metal and probably asbestos and maybe some broken syringes if you believe the rumors.

Then Ben screams.

A door slams shut, and suddenly the group is divided. Eddie, Bill, and Richie are somewhere else. The kitchen, he thinks, a little preoccupied by Mike and Bev trying to hold Ben up, then easing him to the ground as he yells in pain. Stan watches, helpless, as the mangled _H_ reopens, carved deliberately by a blade that isn't there. He looks around wildly, as if the ghost of Henry Bowers is going to appear. Ready to finally finish the job. But there's nothing to see, nothing to _fight_ and the next letter that cuts itself into Ben's stomach is an _o_ instead of an _e_.

Ben writhes, and Bev screams, and Mike yells, and Stan can hear screams coming from the other room, and there's _nothing he can do_.

Stan looks up at the mirror at the same instant Mike does, and his eyes widen when he sees Pennywise, cackling and goading as It tortures his friend.

 _It must show things as they are,_ he thinks, and for a split second, he almost thinks Mike's eyes meet his in the mirror.

Then Bev smashes it, and Ben stops screaming, and Mike grips him tightly, soothing, and Stan realizes he was wrong. It was _in_ the mirror. And he's grateful beyond belief that Bev figured that out and acted quickly.

_She was always afraid of hesitating, but she moved faster than any of them._

The others have gone quiet in the kitchen, and Stan's somehow almost forgotten about them until a single scream sounds and the nonexistent blood in his face drains. He runs towards the sound, taking advantage of his incorporeality to step right through the locked door. He's not sure what he thinks he can do. There's nothing he _can_ do. But he can't stay outside and just listen. He at least has to _know_.

_This is what you wanted from me, huh? To watch? Well, I'm fucking watching._

He steps through the other side of the door just in time to hear Richie say "You've gotta be fucking kidding" and see a many legged…thing scuttle towards him, shrieking. It scampers around wildly, launching itself at them, and it isn't until it finally latches on to Richie's _face_ that Stan finally recognizes what it is.

It's a head. It's _his_ head.

"I'm sorry," he finds himself saying, as Bill grabs on to it and pulls, keeping it just out of reach. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Bill's screaming something, but he can't hear it over the chaos, the guilt, the words looping over again and again in his head:

_You did this. You gave them one more thing to be afraid of._

When Ben bursts through the door and hacks at it with wild enthusiasm ( _maybe a little too much enthusiasm. is there something you want to tell me Ben? ha ha_ ) Stan only feels relief. It scuttles away, horribly, and he watches it go. Then Bev and Mike come rushing in, and _thank God, everyone's alright._

In the moment of relief, he realizes suddenly that he's been crying. He wipes angrily at his face, at the useless, invisible ghost tears.

Bev goes to Richie. Bill backs Eddie up against the wall.

Stan's eyes go wide in horror, then anger, as he watches Bill berate Eddie. Because suddenly, in that moment, they're kids again. And Eddie's looking up at Bill with those huge eyes that say _I'll do anything for you_ and begging him "Please don't be mad Bill," and Bill solemnly tells him not to give It his fear.

Stan watches Bill stalk off, and he's _angry_. Because somehow Bill still doesn't _get it_. He's never understood just how much power he has.

Eddie's chest heaves as he leans heavily on the wall behind him, and Stan recognizes the expression on his face. It's the same one he got when a teacher called him out for messing around with Richie in class, or when Officer Nell caught them building that dam in the Barrens, or when he had to miss Richie's birthday in fourth grade because his mom found out and made him visit his aunts with her instead. It's shame, and pain, and holding back tears. And it makes him look so very small.

They go deeper.

The further they go, the stronger the memories return. And Stan remembers. He's remembered all of this from the moment Mike called him. But somehow even that pales in comparison to the feeling of being back here. Descending deeper and deeper into the heart of evil incarnate, and he isn't even _here_.

For a moment, he's resolute in his conviction that he made the right decision. That if he'd somehow made it to this point alive, he wouldn't be able to take a single step forward.

What surprises him most is the realization that he'd been wavering at all.

 _This is the worst punishment,_ he thinks, watching helplessly as the people he loves the most run and fight and scream in fear, pain, anguish, _to make me stand by and watch. And it's exactly what I deserve._

It's chaos, when they finally make it deep into Its…nest. Everyone separated, running wildly, hiding when they can. They're supposed to be fighting It. They came down here to kill It. But as soon as It unfolded Itself, it instantly became a game of survival. A wild gambol of duck and hide, and Stan doesn't know where to look. He's frozen in place, paralyzed, and it feels so _wrong_ to stand still while doing the same would get any of the rest of them killed. Like he's back in gym class, playing dodgeball, standing in the back and knowing that as long as he stays away from the front, nobody will notice him. But it's a double edged sword because he _knows_ that if he keeps doing it, eventually he's going to be the only one left.

It gets Mike.

Its long tentacles, or talons, or whatever the fuck, wrap tight around him and _squeeze_ , and Stan runs towards him in fear and desperation and stops a few yards short because _there's nothing he can do._ It's mouth opens wide and Stan is close enough to see the rows upon rows of impossibly sharp teeth, glowing from the inside with light so wrong that it _hurts_.

Then something hits It in the side of the head.

"Hey fuckface!" Richie yells, and impossibly, It turns to look at him. It throws Mike, and Stan's stomach drops when his back hits the wall, but he rolls over and groans, which means he's alive, and Stan thinks that's the least he can hope for.

"Wanna play truth or dare?" Richie calls, and Stan wants to scream _stop! Be careful!_ but Richie never listened to him when he was alive, and he sure isn't going to listen to him while he's dead.

"Here's a truth," Richie says, and Stan can see that he's holding something. "You're a sloppy bitch! Yeah that's right! Let's dance!"

He winds up to throw, and It's staring right at him, and Stan thinks _Richie, you idiot_.

"Yippee-kay-aye motherfu"

Richie goes limp.

Even from the ground below, Stan can see his eyes go _white_ , his limbs loose and dangling, his face slack-jawed. It looks _wrong_. Like he's a puppet and all of his strings have been cut except one.

_He used to like puppets. He wanted to be a ventriloquist._

Richie rises into the air (floats) washed in bright orange-red light that feels like looking at the sun.

 _He's dying,_ Stan thinks. _If Bill dived in, and Bev floated on the surface, he's being dragged under._

Before he can even think about what he's doing, Stan is climbing up the rockface. And he's never been athletic, but it doesn't seem to matter. Suddenly he's standing on the landing that Richie had been only moments before, and he wouldn't even be able to reach him at this point if he _could_ grab for his ankle. He's just operating on instinct. To get closer. To do something. He has to do _something_.

(He can't do anything.)

"Beep beep, motherfucker!"

A javelin comes from _nowhere_ and It's suddenly staggering back. Richie falls to the ground, _hard_. And Stan should look at him, make sure he's okay, but he can't take his eyes off of the _thing_ as It impales Itself on very spikes It created when It landed on Earth.

It shrivels, and Stan watches It with hungry, desperate eyes.

_Please let It die. Let it be over with. Let them go home. Bruised, and battered, and scared out of their minds, but alive._

"I think I killed It!" Eddie's saying, but even as Stan prays that it's true, he knows it isn't. Because he's watching It rear back one great big talon, point it at Eddie and _Eddie doesn't see it_.

And Richie is dazed, and everyone else is scattered and far away, and Stan _knows_ that if he doesn't do _something right now_ , Eddie's going to die.

So he does the only thing he can think to do.

He jumps into Eddie.

_"I spent my formative years with William Denbrough. If it's got Clint Eastwood in it, I've seen it."_

That's what Richie said. Yeah? Well Stan spent his formative years with Richard Tozier. So he's seen _Poltergeist_. And _Ghostbusters_. And fucking _Beetlejuice_. And he _knows_ that this is a thing ghosts are supposed to be able to do.

He believes that this is a thing ghosts can do.

So he jumps _into_ Eddie, grabs Richie, and _rolls_.

And he can feel his shirt tear, caught on Its talon as he rolled away, and the world _shake_ with the force with which it jabs at the ground, and suddenly they're rolling and sliding downhill, and it isn't until they suddenly come to a stop at the bottom of a cavern that a slash of pain tears through him and he suddenly realizes _oh, it didn't just get my shirt._

He blinks up at Richie, who's holding onto him tight and looking about as dazed as he feels, and some foreign, disoriented part of him think _I should be on top_.

And _what the fuck Eddie._

_(fuck you!)_

"Eddie!" Richie's suddenly grabbing at his face, desperately, checking him over. When he sees the wide tear in the side of his shirt, and the blood soaking into it, he makes a strangled sound and immediately sits up, tearing his jacket off and balling it up to press against the wound.

"It's okay, Richie," he tries to reassure him, but Richie's still panicking, pressing the jacket hard against his side, like he should, but breathing hard and frantic. He gently grabs Richie's shoulder with the hand that doesn't make him feel like he's tearing himself apart when he moves it, and firmly refuses the instinct to hold the side of his face instead.

_Eddie why._

Richie looks up at him anyway, and his eyes are so wide and worried.

"It's okay, Richie," he repeats, and his hand is too weak to squeeze Richie's shoulder, but he holds firm. "I saved him. He's going to be okay."

Richie stares at him, confused, and refuses to blink. Like he's afraid that if he does, he'll open his eyes and find that Eddie's slipped away.

A wave of wooziness passes over him, and Stan doesn't think he can hold on much longer. Doesn't want to anyway. He's done his part. The rest is up to them.

Besides. He's always played third wheel to these two, and even then this somehow manages to be a new level of gross.

_(fuck! you!)_

_Ideally, no._

He lets Eddie go. Eddie shivers, and suddenly Stan is back to not having a body. Physical, ghostly, or otherwise. He just is.

"Stan?" Eddie mutters, quietly, eyelids drooping closed.

"Hey, hey, hey. You gotta stay awake," Richie says, tapping urgently at his face with the hand that isn't staunching the bleeding.

There's clambering at the hole of the cavern, and suddenly the small space is filled with Losers. They crowd Eddie, try to get Richie off of him to check him too, but he refuses to let go.

Stan watches. He feels…distant. But he doesn't mind. They’re all here, together. And they're strong. So, so, incredibly strong. Eddie stays awake, tells them all that he felt It become small. That they can make It small.

It's hard to hold on. Like he's a kid again and his mother is reading him a story, and he's on the verge of sleep. He doesn't think he's going to get to know the ending. But that's okay. Because he's done his piece. He kept them whole in the end. And he knows that they're going to win. Because if even he can save even one of them, he knows they can save themselves.

He believes it.

In the dim light of the cavern, surrounded by his friends and they plan their final move, Stanley lets go.

 _I love you_ , he thinks. _I'm sorry I left. I love you._

And as the six of them rally to fight the devil itself, one last time, an eyelash twitches in the morgue of the Herschel Thornton Mortuary.

And Stanley Uris wakes up.


	2. After Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So just a warning, there is a LOT of talk about injury, suicide, and mental illness in this chapter. All of the medical stuff is poorly researched, blatantly misrepresented and made up, so please do not take anything I wrote as remotely factual. Similarly, I tried to write all of the discussions about mental health and suicide as thoughtfully as I could, but I do NOT know what I'm talking about and I don't pretend to. Also, the way that characters reacted to and thought about these topics was based on how I thought they would react and think, NOT on how I think or in ways that are necessarily what someone SHOULD do in these situations. God I hope that made sense. If anyone wants a more itemized list of triggers/content warnings, I will be happy to provide one. Thanks for reading! Hope you like it. :)

Venous thromboembolism. That's what they're calling it. Blood clots. One growing on the wall of each subclavian artery. Not big enough to do any major damage where they were, not yet, but once they had broken loose as a result of...increased net blood flow in one direction, big enough to plug things up further down the line and stop him from bleeding out. It was the shock that killed him, supposedly, and also played an ironic role in saving his life by slowing the rate of blood loss. Incidentally, his heart stopping also convinced the EMTs who arrived on the scene that he was already dead. This was unfortunate, because it meant that a couple of highly trained and well-meaning emergency medical professionals are now probably traumatized for life after almost putting a living body in the ground (not to mention absolutely losing their jobs and any chance of finding work again in their field) but also fortunate, because the speed with which he was put on ice apparently saved him the use of his arms. Which, supposedly, had they undergone a few more minutes of cell death, he might have lost for good. But no. Thanks to an incredibly lucky combination of events ( _a medical miracle! unthinkable odds!_ ) he is alive and (mostly) whole. He's also a new proprietor of not an insignificant amount of nerve damage that will leave him with shaky hands and chronic pain for the rest of his life, not to mention he'll be taking blood-thinners indefinitely for his _apparent_ genetic hypercoagulable disorder, but—he's alive.

He's not so sure how he feels about it.

Stan doesn't remember waking up in the morgue, which he is suitably grateful for (apparently he'd been conscious enough to _kick_ , scaring the living hell out of an apprentice who had been disinfecting surfaces at the time) but it doesn't mean he's any less disoriented when gains full consciousness later in a hospital bed.

Because he definitely died, and he _heard_ Patty say he was dead, and if he can't trust that, how can he trust any of it? Which parts of it were a dream?

There's only a nurse in the room when he wakes up, clicking through something on the monitor by the door.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat, and his mouth is so dry that he's surprised it makes a sound at all, but the nurse glances over at him, and her eyes widen slightly. She immediately moves to pick up the phone docked next to the computer.

"I was dead," he says, and the words hurt, ripping from his throat, but he pushes them out anyway. 

The nurse looks at him again and he's surprised at how relieved he is to be heard. She forgoes the phone and comes over to his bedside. She doesn't touch him, but rests her hands on the safety railing and shushes him gently. There's a button pinned to the pocket of her scrub shirt—a little yellow smiley face. He finds himself staring at it.

"It's okay," she says, soothing. "You're okay."

"I—" he tries to say.

"Try not to talk, hon," she says. "Just breathe. Nice, slow, breaths. Like this—breathe with me."

He gives her a confused look as she takes a deep, exaggerated breath in, then lets it out, and it isn't until he does what she asked and copies her, feeling his breath catch as his body fights the rhythm of it, that he realizes he'd been panicking.

 _Huh,_ he thinks, watching himself breathe with the nurse from some floating place outside of his body.

He closes his eyes after a while, trying to stall the buzzing in his sinuses and bring himself back into his body. When he opens them again, the nurse is watching him carefully. He nods, slightly, and she looks satisfied.

"I'm gonna call the doctor in, okay? She'll explain everything."

Stan nods, and she goes to pick up the phone again, watching him. He stares back while she asks for a Dr. Giang, and says to inform her that "Mr. Uris" is awake.

His throat still feels like sandpaper, but he has to ask, once she puts down the phone.

"Patty?" he says, hoarsely.

She nods.

"Your wife just stepped out to use the restroom," she says. "She's been waiting for you to wake up."

The nurse nods towards a cot set up next to his bed that he hadn't noticed, and he wonders how long he's been here. How long Patty's been waiting for him. He wants to ask, but he doesn't want to waste his words. Besides, she said the doctor would explain. Instead he asks:

"Could you ask her not to come in?" He says it weakly, not just the product of a dry throat. "While the doctor's here."

The nurse stares at him. It's a hard look that does nothing to hide her disapproval. And he knows it's another selfish decision in what seems to be an endless string of selfish decisions, but he _needs_ this. He needs a moment to wrap his head around the idea that he was dead, and now he's not. And he needs to do it by himself, because he's already put Patty through so much and all he needs is a little time to understand.

There's a brisk knock on the door, and the doctor comes in, all short spiky black hair and half-moon glasses. The nurse excuses herself, throwing out drily that she has to go "ask Mrs. Uris to wait outside." If the doctor disapproves with his decision as much as the nurse does, she doesn't show it, simply nodding and pulling up a chair beside Stan's bed. She hands him a paper cup filled with water that he takes in shaky hands (he tries not to focus on the bandages, or the IV) and sips at gratefully.

She introduces herself as Dr. Giang and explains that he's in the hospital. He knows both of these things already, but nods anyway. Then she puts her clipboard down on her knees, fixes him with a steady gaze and asks:

"How are you feeling?"

He blinks, realizing suddenly how unprepared he was for the question. He has to look up at the ceiling and think about it for a moment before he can answer. She's patient.

"Tired," he says eventually. "Sore."

She doesn't say anything, and when he looks over at her again, she looks like she's still waiting for something else.

"Good," he settles on.

"Good?" she gives him a curious look.

"I'm, yeah. I'm happy to be here."

She nods and doesn't press him on it, then goes on to explain everything. The blood clots and the heart failure. The cell death and nerve damage. She tells him he spent over 24 hours in the morgue, legally dead, and that he's very lucky there was someone nearby when he regained consciousness the first time. She doesn't hold anything back and delivers it all clinically. She tells him it's been two nights since he was brought in, that they've been keeping him stable and replacing the fluids he lost. He has stitches on both forearms and two small incisions where they removed the blood clots and he's currently on a fair amount of painkillers, which is why he can describe himself as "sore" rather than "in a horrible amount of anguish."

He nods along as she explains, and when she's finally done, she asks him if he has any questions.

He has one.

"What are the chances?" he asks, quietly.

She studies him for a moment. Her eyes seem to glimmer behind her half-moon glasses.

"Astronomical," she admits. "You're very lucky to be alive."

He's quiet for a moment, then he nods.

"I know," he says.

She calls for a nurse not long after and passes along his "okay" when asked if Mrs. Uris can come in now. She waits for them with him, asking conversationally about his job and hobbies, and Stan realizes distantly _they're not leaving me alone in the room._

Then there's a knock on the door and in comes the same nurse from before, followed closely behind by

"Patty," Stan says, eyes already burning.

She stares at him, eyes wide and magnified behind her horn-rimmed glasses. She looks exhausted, sad, and confused. She looks afraid.

His heart breaks.

"I'm so sorry, Patty," he says, and he can't help the shuddering sob that breaks out of him. "I'm sorry, I—"

And then she's there. Sitting as close to him as the chair will allow, and gently taking one of his hands in both of hers.

"It's okay," she sooths, petting the back of his hand. Tears roll down her face. "It's okay."

They keep him overnight, and Patty stays by his side the whole time, never letting go of his hand. She tells him about the nurses who have been taking care of him, and the things they all talked about while he was asleep (that's how she says it, "asleep") and she shows him the copy of National Geographic she borrowed from the lobby, and reads to him a piece about motherhood in crocodiles, and when he promises that he'll explain everything as soon as they get home (it only hits him when he says it—a sudden intense fear that she might not _want_ him to come home) she just nods. Solemn, and firm, like she knows he will.

They change his bandages to check for infection, and (against his better judgement) he looks. There isn't any leaking liquid, which the nurse says is a good sign, but he can't bring himself to match her enthusiasm about it. The skin is puffy and pink, held together by thick black thread. He finds himself staring at the stitches numbly, reminded in a distant way of the darns his mother would put in his khakis when he was a kid. Other kids might have been embarrassed by it, walking around in patched clothing because it saved a precious few bucks when money was tight, but Stan never thought of it that way. He remembers thumbing over the crossing threads and appreciating the way they put something broken back together, even if it would never be the same as it was before. Because what was underneath was something worth saving.

Something still good.

In the morning, they start going about removing his tubes. It's painful, and frustrating, but it's also a relief to be responsible for his own bodily functions again. Patty is there with him for all of it, holding his hand, and helping him stand and walk the few feet to the toilet when he has to.

The only time she leaves for more than a few minutes is when the psychiatrist comes in and asks for some time alone with him. Patty nods in understanding and tells Stan to text her when he's ready. Dr. Giang told him that most of his fluids were replaced while he was unconscious and that the rest of his recovery can be done just as well at home, so as soon as the psychiatrist clears him he'll be free to go.

Needless to say, he's a little anxious to pass whatever assessment is in store for him.

The psychiatrist is a short man with a goatee, who introduces himself as Dr. Vásquez. He asks Stan about himself, his job, his family. Stan knows he's just trying to make him comfortable, maybe get some background on his life and why he wouldn't want anything to do with it anymore, but there's something in his warm, brown eyes that convinces him that he cares about his answers. So Stan tells him truthfully, and doesn't mind.

He loves his wife. They want children, and even though they haven't had any luck yet, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to have them. They've talked about adopting if Patty's age starts to make pregnancy unsafe. He's happy with his job. It's structured, and secure, and he makes enough that they can take regular vacations, and Patty can continue to teach without worrying about not being able to make bills.

He's happy. And he has been for a while.

"I'm glad to hear it," Dr. Vásquez says, smiling. "Can I ask then, what happened?"

Stan goes quiet, and not for the reason Dr. Vásquez probably thinks. There's no easy way to explain what happened to him that won't land him in the mental ward. To be honest, he's not sure he doesn't belong there.

"I got a call from an old friend," he says slowly. "Someone I barely remembered, from childhood."

Dr. Vásquez nods for him to continue, and Stan sweats. His arms prickle beneath his bandages.

"I don't remember a lot from my childhood," he admits. "Or, I didn't."

He studies the doctor carefully, for any indication that what he's saying will end up keeping him here longer. Dr. Vásquez gives him nothing, just continues to listen to him with an open, neutral expression.

"And then Mi—my friend called." He doesn't know why he catches himself guiltily on Mike's name. As if telling this total stranger in Georgia his first name will somehow incriminate him. "And it suddenly all came back."

"What did your friend say?" Dr. Vásquez asks.

"He wanted me to come back to our hometown," Stan says. "For a sort of…reunion, and I—"

He cuts himself off. Dr. Vásquez waits patiently for him to collect his thoughts.

"I barely made it out of there alive the first time," he says quietly. "We all did."

"We?"

"Me and my friends. The ones I…forgot." He regrets bringing up the amnesia. He doesn't think it's helping his chances of getting to go home. "You must think I'm crazy."

Dr. Vásquez gives him a firm look. It reminds him a bit of Bill.

"'Crazy' is not a medical term," he says. "And what you're describing is not as rare as you think."

Stan gives him a wild look.

"It sounds like you went through some traumatic events in your childhood."

Stan almost wants to laugh.

"You could say that," he says flatly, instead.

"Well," Dr. Vásquez says, "it's not uncommon for people who go through trauma to experience periods of memory loss. It's one of the ways our brains try to protect ourselves from things that hurt us. We call it Dissociative Amnesia, and most of the time memory recovery happens all at once in response to some kind of trigger."

Stan stares at him. He doesn't seem put off by it.

"What did you feel when your friend called you?"

He swallows, thickly.

"Fear," he says. The heavy weight of the word seems to sit in the air for a moment. "I was afraid that I had to go back. And that if I did, I would never make it out again."

Dr. Vásquez nods, as if this were a perfectly normal answer, and Stan is caught by a feeling that the reality he woke up in is different from the one he's always known. Because somehow he's talking about his demonic childhood town and this licensed medical professional is nodding along like it makes perfect sense.

"Stanley," he says, carefully, "have you had suicidal thoughts in the past?"

Stan starts to shake his head automatically, then stops. Slowly, he nods.

"When I was…when I was younger. Not recently, I—" He presses his lips together, tightly. "Remembering seemed to suddenly make it…an option. Again."

It had been so long since he had felt it. That tunnel vision feeling like everything was terrifyingly awful, and never would get any better. That feeling of being alone, even when he was surrounded by his friends. Like they were all going to get bored of him and leave one day. And why wouldn't they? He was never much fun. He remembers Beverly saying

_"You don't have to be so sad."_

"Did you leave a note?" Dr. Vásquez asks, and Stan nods absentmindedly before he can think about it, then panics when he realizes.

"I wasn't in my right mind," he says, hurriedly. "I don't think it made much sense."

"It's okay," Dr. Vásquez says, soothing. "If it's alright with you, we'd like a copy for our records. Nobody's going to judge you for it. We're just trying to keep you safe."

Stanley nods, slowly. He copied it down six times, so he's pretty sure there's no explicit mention of a demon clown from outer space, but even so he's not sure it paints him in the sanest of lights.

"I'll talk to Patty," he says. "I don't know if she kept…it."

Dr. Vásquez asks him a few more questions, points him to some resources, and offers to meet with him until he can get him set up with a more regular psychologist. And when he finally deems Stan safe to go home, he tells him so.

"Take care of yourself, Stanley," he says, shaking his hand as though it isn't held together by bandages and thread. "It sounds like there are some people who really care about you."

When he finally signs the discharge papers, with a shaky, numb hand, he's so relieved he could cry.

°°°

Stan meant what he said when he promised to tell Patty everything as soon as they got home, but he didn't account for the sheer exhaustion that overcomes him the moment he crosses the threshold. It's only half-passed four, but Patty takes one look at him and starts leading him upstairs, holding him steady as he slowly mounts each step, and depositing him directly in their bed.

He resolves to close his eyes for just a few minutes, and promises Patty it won't be long. She nods along solemnly. He then proceeds to sleep for fifteen hours straight, and wakes up with a murderous headache, a painfully full bladder, and a mouth so dry that he can barely pry his lips apart.

Patty's awake and downstairs when he finally makes his way down after taking care of these issues as best as he can. He can hear her in the kitchen, a frying pan sizzling. She's humming.

She looks up when she hears him come in and fixes him with a smile that's sad around the edges. He thinks all of her smiles will be like that for a while, and he aches for it.

"Eggs and toast?" she asks, already sliding two eggs on to a plate, sunny-side up.

"Yes please," he says, and maybe normally he'd append a pet name to it, but he's not sure if he's ready for that yet. He's certain he hasn't earned it.

She butters his toast while he sits at the table, upsettingly exhausted by a simple trip down the stairs, and sets the completed plate in front of him along with a tall glass of orange juice. She doles out his meds as well. Pain medication, iron supplements, antibiotics, and blood thinners placed carefully on a napkin and served with a glass of water.

_Eddie Kaspbrak, eat your heart out._

He waits for her to cook two more eggs and a fresh piece of toast for herself. And usually, he thinks she would bug him about letting his food get cold, in that joking way that tells him she's pleased that he still waits to eat with her even after all of these years. But she stays quiet, and the silence that sits behind the sizzling pan and ticking toaster isn't awkward or tense, but it's sad.

She sits down across from him and he takes the first of many pills, choked down with a bite of toast. He's always been bad at swallowing pills. He wonders if he'll get any better at it in the next couple of weeks.

_Practice makes perfect._

He's finished his pills and halfway through his toast and eggs when he puts down his glass of orange juice and stares at the table, breathing deeply.

"I want to explain," he says. "I will explain, I just. I don't know where to start."

He can feel Patty watching him, pausing between bites. She puts her fork and knife down and takes his hand gently across the table. He stares, mesmerized as her thumb brushes over his knuckles, then looks up at her.

"Finish your breakfast," she says, gentle but firm. She knows that if he starts talking now, he never will.

"I love you." His voice breaks with it.

"I know," she says, giving his hand a little squeeze, then pulling it back.

And somehow, despite everything, he believes her.

°°°

He explains everything. And he means _everything_. He starts at the beginning. Growing up in Derry as one of the only Jewish kids at his school who was always tight on money, and how he was targeted for it. Meeting Richie in first grade, then Bill and Eddie shortly after. Birdwatching with his father and marching around Derry with his little bird book. Little Georgie Denbrough, and poor Betty Ripsom, and all the other kids who went missing that year.

He tells her about It. His first encounter, and how he didn't want to believe it was real. But how, after meeting Ben and building that dam with him, hearing that the other Losers had seen It too, he had to believe it. Tells her about the rest of that summer. Bev, and Mike. Henry Bowers and Patrick Hocksetter. The apocalyptic rock fight. The club house. The smoke hole. Fighting It in the sewers and thinking they won. Cutting their hands on that broken coke bottle because they knew they didn't.

He had a scar, he tells her, for a while after, but it had disappeared after he left Derry, along with his memories of the place. Both had faded away slowly, he thinks, at first just the details becoming fuzzy around the edges. And then gradually less and less, until there was nothing left of his childhood except the vague notion that he'd had one.

He tells her about the phone call from Mike, and everything coming back at once. He tells her about the overwhelming fear he felt, and knowing—thinking— _believing_ in that moment that they truly would be better off without him. Safer. He tells her how the rest of the world, of his life, seemed to disappear under the horrible, endless shadow of It. Tunnel vision, with no way out, and no way to turn around.

That's the hardest part to talk about, and it _should_ be the final part. But even when he comes to what should be the end of it, Patty doesn't make any indication that she's ready for him to stop. Almost as if she knows that there's more. So he pauses, takes a drink from his coffee that's long gone cold, and tells her the rest.

Coming back to Derry as a ghost. Seeing all of his childhood friends all grown up. Watching them fight. Saving Eddie's life. Thinking that _finally_ , that was it. The true end. After everything. And then waking up in the hospital and thinking _I should be dead._

She stays quiet for all of it. Sitting next to him on the sofa, but with a little space in between, holding her mug in both hands, fingers slipped under the handle. If she has any second thoughts about letting him walk out of that hospital, she certainly doesn't show it. He watches her for signs of frustration, worry, confusion, but he can't find any of it, so he just pushes through. Lays out everything as best as he can and hopes that it's enough. Not for her to forgive him, or even understand, but to at very least be honest. To do right by her in this one, small way.

And at the end of everything, she looks at him carefully, and he tries to let her see, and she nods. Once.

"Alright," she says, accepting.

Stan looks at her.

"Alright?" he says, a little skeptical. "You don't think I'm making it all up?"

She gives him a thoughtful look.

"Are you?" she asks. He shakes his head. "Then, alright."

He gives her a wild look, and she sighs.

"You don't lie to me Stanley," she says, matter of fact. "So if you told me all of this happened, I'd believe at very least that you believed it. But…"

Her gaze drifts away from him, and he watches her intently.

"But…?" he prompts.

She taps her finger against her mug for a moment, then sighs again.

"I don't see how you could have known about that phone call," she says. "When your friend called me. I didn't tell anyone about it."

He stares at her. If she says she believes him, he believes her. Of course he does. But he can't help but be a little incredulous. A little…jealous even. That it's so easy for her to accept, when all of his life has been spent fighting against it.

"So that's it," he says. "You believe me. You believe in…demons, aliens, ghosts. Magic."

She gives him a funny look, like there's something obvious he's missing.

"Stanley, you've always been a little bit magic."

And if that's not enough to send him reeling, he's not sure what is. But he also doesn't really know what to do with that, so he just gives her a flat look.

"Me," he says, being in all ways a forty year old accountant who spends his weekends bird-watching. "Magical."

"Yes you, Stanley." Patty smiles, and it's still a little sad, but it's also nostalgic and sweet.

He waits for her to explain, for long enough that he starts to think she's not going to, but then she does.

"Do you remember the first time we met?" she asks.

"Of course," he says, remembering. "That charity event for your sorority…"

But she shakes her head.

"No," she says. "There was a time before that."

Stan furrows his brow and stares into his cup of coffee. How many other significant life events has he miraculously forgotten?

"It was towards the end of fall," she says. "I remember because it was too cold for you to be out in just a sweater and slacks, but there you were."

He looks at her, confused and ashamed that he doesn't remember. But she doesn't seem hurt, just wistful.

"You were sitting on a bench, outside of the library. And it was far too late for you to just be there for no reason. Too late, and too cold. But there you were, just sitting. And I'd been crying because my grandmother died the day before, and I wasn't able to make it to the funeral. And somehow even though my world was ending I still had tests to study for and events to arrange, and you were just sitting there in the cold, doing nothing. And suddenly I was angry, and there you were. So I yelled at you, a total stranger, and I asked you what you thought you were doing. And you said you didn't know, you just—"

"knew I had to be here," Stan finishes. He stares at the carpet. "I… I'd forgotten."

Patty nods, as if this makes perfect sense. Which, given Stan's track record for forgetting things (apparently), maybe it does.

"You were so…solemn," she says. "It made me feel ashamed for suddenly bursting like that. It was so unlike me. But then when all the anger fizzled out, all that was left was sadness. And I didn't want that either. So I tried to push that away as well. And you said… Do you remember?"

She looks at Stan, and he thinks.

"I said…" he starts slowly, lifting his eyes to gaze gently towards the window. "There's never enough time to grieve."

She nods, smiling.

"You didn't know what I was going through. You couldn't have. But there you were, telling me that you understood. I didn't understand what you meant exactly, not at the time. You've always been…cryptic." She smiles. "But those words stuck with me through the next couple of weeks. And then I met you at the charity event, and if you recognized me at all, you never said. But I knew it was you from the start."

He stares at her, dumbfounded. And now that she's said it, he does remember that night. He doesn't think he forgot it, not like how he forgot It and Derry and everything else, but it had rested in the back of his mind. Subconscious. Unconscious, even. Waiting to be woken up. And he doesn't remember _why_ he'd gone there, waited there, and said what he'd said. Just that it felt like the right thing to do. And he hadn't questioned it.

"You always know the right thing to do," Patty says, looking at him. "Moving to Atlanta, applying to your firm. Everything works out just like you say it will."

He frowns.

"And you say things too," she says. "Things that don't make sense, or shouldn't make sense, until all of the sudden they do."

He shakes his head.

"No," he says. "No, I'm not… Ben maybe. Eddie. Definitely Bill, but not…I'm not…"

He remembers the bird book. Holding the carefully worn pages in his hands. Flipping it open in the face of danger and reading. As if he could somehow counter the existence of something he couldn't know or understand, with something he did. He can't remember why he did it. There's no _reason_ he should have thought it would help at all. But he did, so he did it. Because it felt like the right thing to do.

"I've been waiting, for a long time, for something like this to happen," Patty admits, twisting the mug in her hands. "Every year we've spent together has felt like I've been cheating something. Like I'm getting to have something I was never supposed to have."

He stares at her numbly, heart breaking. But she's strong. She's always been so strong.

"That night," she says, and her voice tightens. "When I…found you. I thought—"

She cuts herself off and presses her lips together. Stan shifts towards her and places a gentle, trembling hand on her wrist. She lets him pry it from her cup, and twists it to interlace her fingers with his.

"I thought," she continues, "oh. So this is it. This is what I've been outrunning."

He squeezes her hand as best as he can, and she looks at him, smiling through the tears that roll down her face. He's crying too.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm so sorry."

"I know," she says, and her hand tightens around his.

He wants more than anything to wrap his arms around her, but they're too shaky and weak, and besides that he's not yet sure if he's allowed. So he just sits there, fingers laced with hers, and mourns with her.

"I'm glad you saved your friend," she says eventually, "I am. And I'm glad you got to keep your promise. But I need you to know…"

Her grip on his hand tightens, near painfully, and the look she fixes him with is unyielding.

"I need you to understand," she says. "That there is nothing in the world worth losing you for. Not to me."

He can't help it then, the fresh tears that fall, and the sobs that wrack him. Too big for his chest, just like when he was a kid. This time she comes closer, wraps her arms gently around, and she holds him.

"I was afraid," he says, through his tears. "I'm always so afraid."

"I know," she says, as she holds him. "I know."

°°°

The next few weeks are…peaceful. It's still summer, so Patty's school doesn't start for another month and a half, and Stan's currently jobless as a result of the whole being legally dead for 24 hours thing, so they spend the time in each other's quiet company. The first week or so, Stan sleeps a lot. He sits with Patty while she cooks, and they listen to Edith Piaf and Madame Butterfly, and eat together at the kitchen table. They do crossword puzzles, and watch Netflix, and go on slow, careful walks around the neighborhood in the cool of the evenings. Stan takes his medicine, and eats his fish, and yogurt, and green leafy vegetables. Patty helps him clean his wounds and change his bandages, and always kisses him on the back of each hand, and even though it's hard for him to feel it and even harder for him to see, he'd never ask her to stop.

His parents visit. They're in their late 70s, and don't travel much thanks to his father's bad back, but they were already coming down for the funeral and take the opportunity instead to see their son alive. And it's good to see them, he's glad he can show them that he's still in one piece, but they don't fully understand, not like Patty does. His mother is misty-eyed for the entire visit, and his father is stoic, and when they finally leave, he feels guiltily relieved.

When he starts to feel up to it, he and Patty take a few trips to museums and gardens. They walk slowly through air conditioned hallways and look at beautiful and strange things that people made, make quiet jokes to each other, and sit down on benches to stare lovingly into brushstrokes and catch their breath. They walk down dirt paths, and look at flowers and trees, and point out birds and dragonflies and gray squirrels. They sit in tea gardens and sip chamomile and coffee, and watch children spill lemonade and drag their parents into giftshops. They pick quiet spots to sit, and Stan watches Patty sketch little pieces of the world around them; a funny bug, a heart-shaped leaf, the knuckles of his hand.

They get a partial refund on their tickets to Buenos Aires, and spend some of the money on a few nice nights out. Restaurants with white tablecloths, and low-lighting, and live music. Their favorite is a little Ethiopian place, where they sit in a tiny booth in the back and the waiter pours warm water over their hands, and they feed each other bites of stewed lentils and spiced chicken wrapped in pillowy injera, and listen to the gentle crooning of the live jazz band. The rest is put away safely, with the understanding that they might be living off of Patty's income for a while, and while they've always been smart about savings, and emergency funds, and contingency plans, they also have medical bills, and prescriptions, and therapy, and plenty of rainy days waiting for them nestled among the sunny ones.

Stan's office sends him a fruit basket with a note saying to give them a call if he's ever ready to come back to work, and he enjoys the pears and marmalade, but he's not sure he ever will be. He's always liked his job, he tells Patty, but he's not sure he can just go back to life as usual, everything the way it was before. Like doing so is pretending it never happened. Forgetting. She says she understands.

Not every day is good. Patty wakes up from nightmares as much as he does. And there are long afternoons where one of them will seem to fall vacant, or burst into tears suddenly and without warning. There are late nights spent holding each other, because it hurts too much not to, and early mornings spent standing in the kitchen, holding mugs of coffee and not finding a single thing to say to one another. They go to therapy. Separately, and together, and Stan relearns a whole slew of acronyms he thought he knew, and never would have thought could apply to him.

_OCD: But I don't wash my hands until they bleed, like my Aunt Martha did. I don't check the stove and the locks._

— _But you do things slowly, so that they always turn out Right. You turn the key twice, and count to seven after starting your car, so that you don't hit anyone. You worry about hurting people, with the things you say or do. You worry about being Good. That if you're not careful, you won't be._

_PTSD: But I never fought in a war. I never heard gunshots and bombs. I don't flinch at firecrackers._

— _But you spent so many years afraid for your life. You ran from monsters of every kind. You saw bodies, and posters of missing children. You woke up each day and wondered if all of your friends would still be there by the end of it. You felt pain, and terror that you couldn't even comprehend. And remembering it after so many years hurt so much that it killed you._

_Depression: But I'm not sad all the time. I love my wife. I'm happy with my life. I'm…happy._

— _Are you? Or are you numb? Do you isolate yourself from potential friends? Do you feel like there's a wall between you and everyone else? Do you sometimes lose time, staring into space, because you can't work yourself up to do anything? Feel anything? How long have you felt like you were under water? Watching the world around you happen while you stand still?_

He brings home these revelations to Patty, and she nods in understanding, like she's known all along, and he can't help remembering what she said. That she'd been waiting for something like this to happen for a very long time. And at the time he thought she meant something supernatural. Something magical. Now he has to wonder if she meant something else. When he nervously brings home the idea that he wasn't just suicidal as a child, and then suddenly again as an adult, but that he's maybe been casually suicidal for all of it, she looks sad, but not surprised, and they talk about jokes he's made and little things he's said that have scared her over the years.

Patty watches him closely, and he can't blame her. She doles out his pills, and handles any and all sharp objects, which would present a danger enough in his newly unsteady hands, and sits on the lid of the toilet playing anagram games on her phone while he showers in the downstairs hall bathroom.

Neither of them use the master bathroom any more. Stan promises himself he'll have it redone until it's unrecognizable if they don't eventually move instead.

There's the physical pain too. Healing from two major lacerations, and recovering from what should have been, in all rights, a fatal amount of blood loss, isn't easy work. The pain is as frustrating as it feels well-deserved, and he hates how he spills the things he's supposed to be measuring when he cooks with Patty, and how his handwriting, which used to be so neat and orderly, now shudders and shakes across the page, like a child still learning how to write. It will get better, he's promised, with physical therapy and time, but his hands will never be as steady as they used to be, and he shouldn't get his hopes up for perfection.

That's going to take a while to come to terms with.

He doesn't try to contact the Losers. Patty doesn't like it, and makes her disapproval known, but she says she understands that he needs time and won't hear it when he says he needs _forever_. He just can't take the idea of seeing them and their disappointment. It's a closed wound by now, he's sure. He can't face them, in all of his cowardice, and tell them: _just kidding! You all went back and fought your worst fears, I stayed home and took a bath, and look! We all got off scot-free!_

Patty shakes her head when he tries to explain, and assures him that when he tells them ( _when, not if_ ) they'll be overjoyed to see him again. And he trusts Patty more than anything, but he's not so sure he believes her on this one.

So the weeks after are hard. And they're lovely. And more than anything they're intense in a way he hasn't felt in so long. Desperate pain and beauty that cut through the veneer that's been coating his existence. And even though it hurts, he's glad to have it. Because it means he gets to be real for the first time in a very long time.

Despite everything, Stanley Uris heals.

°°°

It's about a month After when Patty gets a call. She's washing dishes after dinner, and Stan's sitting on the sofa because he almost dropped a glass that he'd been drying and Patty had taken one look at his ashen face and made him go sit down. Even so, the mood is light. They're getting better (he's getting better) at dealing with these little incidents as they come, and not letting them ruin the rest of the evening, so Stan went to put on some music, and Patty's joking about something her sister posted on Facebook, and he's smiling because it's amusing and he loves her so much.

Patty's ringtone is a bubbling, bouncy thing, and she squeals when she hears it, drying her hands on a dishtowel and going to pick it up. It's an unknown number.

"Ooh, Nebraska," she says, making her way around to the couch because Patty likes to pick up scam calls and try to keep the caller on the line for as long as possible. Stan rolls his eyes, but he's smiling despite himself.

She sits down with him and puts the phone down in the space between them, picking up the call and immediately switching it to speaker phone.

"Hello?" she says, a mischievous smile already quirking on her face.

It freezes in place when a voice comes through.

"Hello. Is this Patricia Uris?"

Stan and Patty lock eyes, dumbfounded, and Stan knows she recognizes the voice as well as he does. He presses his lips tight together, eyes wide, and Patty stares at him as if to say: _say something_.

"This is Beverly Marsh," Bev says, perhaps taking Patty's silence for confusion. "I don't know if you remember, but I called you a couple of weeks ago."

"I remember," Patty says, tightly, eyes still locked onto Stan. He says nothing, and breaks his gaze away from her, staring adamantly at the coffee table instead.

"Of course," Beverly says, and poor Bev probably thinks Patty's frustrated with her, but she handles it smoothly. She always does. "I'm so sorry to bother you. It's just. I was a childhood friend of Stan's. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't talk about us much, but there were seven of us. We were having a…reunion the last time I called."

Patty says nothing, and Stan can feel her staring at him. Beverly sighs on the line.

"We were all so…sad. To hear what happened. And knowing that we never got to meet him, all grown up." Stan can hear the tight grief in Bev's voice. He closes his eyes. "We were planning to come down to Atlanta this weekend for a sort of memorial. I know it's last minute, but… We wanted to invite you."

Silence. Stan refuses to open his eyes.

"It's just. We thought you might be able to tell us a little bit about what he was like. And maybe we could tell you a little bit about how he was as a kid. I understand, though, if it's too hard. Or if…I mean. I know we're total strangers…"

Patty makes a little noise.

"I can't do this," she says, and Stan looks up at her, wide-eyed. The look she fixes him with is hard. "Either say something, or I'm hanging up right now."

Stan blanches and hears Bev fumble on the line.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to…"

"Not you, dear," Patty says, looking pointedly at Stan.

He swallows. Mouth suddenly too dry. He clears his throat quietly.

"Hi Bev," he manages, and his stomach drops as the words leave him.

There's silence on the line, and Patty's still looking at him, urging with her eyes for him to _say more_ , but he doesn't think he can.

"Stan?" Bev says quietly, anyway. He takes a shuddering breath.

"Yeah," he says.

There's a sniff on the other line, a strange choking sound, and a little commotion through which he thinks he hears her say "it's him. Yes, I'm sure."

Then the quality of the call changes, and suddenly Ben's voice is coming through the phone.

"Stan?" he says.

"Hi Ben," he says.

There's a beat of silence, and then what sounds like Ben saying "nope" and suddenly the line is dead. Hung up.

Stan blinks the phone on the couch, then looks up and stares at Patty, dumbfounded. She seems equally thrown. A moment passes in silence, then the phone starts ringing again. Patty answers it before Stan can even think about it.

"Hi, sorry about that," Beverly is saying. "Ben panicked and hung up, so it's just me again. But he brought up a good point, so Stan, honey, I'm gonna need you to talk a bit more."

"I don't know what to say," he admits, glancing nervously at Patty. She nods encouragingly.

"Tell me about our first date," Bev says, and Stan can't help the startled laugh that escapes him.

"You should know my wife is sitting right next to me," he says, even though Patty is only smiling curiously.

"Yeah well my… Ben is here too," Beverly says. "So keep it PG if you like."

"Ah yes," he says solemnly, "I'll make sure to censor all of the sexually explicit laundry content."

She giggles, and it's a little high and strangled, but something in Stan softens.

"It was after we helped you clean up the mess in your bathroom," he recalls slowly. "You and I went down to the laundramat to wash the rags so your mom wouldn't notice. I had two dollars left over from my allowance and you tried to pay me back with a couple of nickels. I didn't let you."

"Do you remember what you said?"

"Something smart about going dutch?"

"It was sweet."

"If you say so, Marsh."

There's a beat of silence, and Stan hears her take a shaky breath. His eyes are damp.

"I can't… How, Stan? What happened? Patricia said…and I saw—"

"I know, Bev," he says. "What you saw… It was real. It happened. But I'm alright, now."

"How did you know—"

"It's a long story," Stan says, quickly.

"Stanley," Bev says, warning.

"I'll explain everything, I promise," he says. "I'd just rather not have to explain it six times—four, I guess. If you've paired off."

"Four? Why—" she cuts herself off this time. "Oh god, the others. We have to tell them. They'll be so relieved. Everyone's missed you so much and—"

"Bev," Stan says, suddenly more nervous than he can begin to explain. "Could you not…"

He's not sure what he was going to say, but apparently the pervading silence speaks for him.

"Stan," Bev says slowly. "I have to tell them."

"I— Yes. Of course," he says, hating his own hesitation.

"Stanley," Bev says. It sounds like it hurts her. He closes his eyes against it.

"Just. Could you ask them not to…" He grimaces. "You said you're all coming to Atlanta this weekend, right? Could you… Could you just give me until then?"

There's silence for a moment, and Stan waits for some good old Beverly Marsh moral outrage, but it doesn't come. Instead, she just sighs.

"Of course," she says, quietly. "I think only Mike has this number any way. We'll keep them off your back until then."

"Thank you," he says. Bev hums.

"Stan…" she says after a moment. There's a wavering worry in her voice. "You're safe, right? You said your wife was there with you?"

"Always," Patty says. And Stan didn't exactly forget she was there, but her voice brings him back to himself a little.

"And she's…" She hesitates. "She's good, right?"

Stan thinks about the bruises on Bev's wrists, and the way she changed the subject when asked about her husband. He thinks about Eddie spiraling into talking about his wife, then suddenly wincing and going mute. He thinks about Bill kissing Beverly in the lobby of the Townhouse, despite being married to someone else.

"Yeah," he says with firm sincerity. "She's good."

Beverly takes a shaky breath.

"Okay," she says. "I trust you."

"Thanks Bev."

"I'll see you soon, okay?" she says. "And Stan?"

"Yeah?"

"We love you," she says. "So much. You know that, right?"

"Yeah, I—" his voice catches in his throat. He has to clear it. "I love you too."

He takes a shuddery breath, after Beverly hangs up, and all he can think about is the weekend. Today's Wednesday. Two days from now. He has to face them and it's too sudden. It's too much.

Stan feels careful fingers on his wrist and opens his eyes. When he looks up, Patty is watching him. She looks proud.

It makes him strong.

°°°

Saturday morning finds Stan awake at a quarter to six, standing stiffly in his own kitchen, and nursing a cup of coffee. He's low on sleep, having spent most of the previous night staring numbly at the ceiling, but he can't bring himself to feel tired. There's too much, and too little, going on in his head all at once. He can hear the shower running in the other room and feels bad for getting Patty up so early, but she insisted she'd slept plenty and would be up within the hour anyway.

He hears the shower shut off and stares at the oven clock, wondering how fifteen minutes escaped by under his careful supervision. Patty swings through the kitchen on her way upstairs, wrapped in a towel and hair dripping. She takes one look at him and floats over, carefully pulling the mug out of his hands and placing it on the counter behind him. She replaces it with her hands in his, squeezing.

"It's going to be okay," she says, earnestly. "They love you, Stanley. They're going to be happy to see you."

He grits his teeth, shuddering slightly, and his head tips forward. Patty kisses him softly, then presses her forehead against his.

"It's okay, sweetie," she says. "It's going to be okay."

°°°

Around eight o'clock, there's a knock on the door. Stan freezes where he's sitting on the couch with Patty, doing a crossword together while they wait. She puts the newspaper down and reaches over to squeeze his arm gently.

"I'll make some fresh coffee," she says. He nods.

Walking to the door feels like walking to the gallows. He should know, he's done it before. And even though he _knows_ that what's waiting for him on the other side isn't going to kill him, he can't help feeling like the twisting in his stomach might.

Stan opens the door.

Bill Denbrough looks exactly like he did a month ago. His hair is a little shorter, like he just got it cut. And his eyes are tired, likely thanks to the red-eye that got him here. But there he is. In a flannel shirt, no less.

For a long moment, they just stare at each other. And Stan can tell that Bill's doing the same thing he did when he first saw them that night at the Orient. Looking. Remembering. Taking stock of all of the little things that are the same, hidden between all of the things that are different.

"Hi Bill," he says, when the silence becomes too much for him to bear.

"Stan," Bill says, and suddenly surges forward, arms wrapped tight around him. Stan flounders for a moment, hands hovering over his friend's back. But Bill just holds him, so he lets them settle. Lets his head tip forward to rest against Bill's shoulder. He feels Bill shudder and hears a shaky intake of breath. Stan can feel tears already starting to trail down his face. And god, Stan's always been an easy crier, but if this is any indication of how the day is going to go, he thinks he'll have run dry by noon.

"It's g-good to see you Stanley," Bill says into his shoulder.

Stan closes his hands, fingers gripping at the soft fabric of Bill's shirt.

"Yeah," Stan says. "It's…good."

Bill finally pulls back, and Stan lets go reluctantly, letting Bill hold him by the shoulders and look at him again. There's something amusing about it, like he's a little kid and Bill's checking him over for damage after a tumble, but then Bill's eyes catch on where the sleeve of his shirt has ridden up to reveal a bit of bandaging, and suddenly he doesn't find it funny. He just feels ashamed.

"Come on in, Bill," he says, pulling away gently. And Bill nods, letting him.

Stan takes him through to the kitchen where Patty is refreshing her own drink. She looks up when she hears them and smiles warmly.

"Coffee?" she offers, taking one look at Bill and already pulling down another mug.

"Yes please," he says, looking exhausted and grateful. "That would be amazing."

"Bill, this is my wife Patty," Stan says. "Patty, this is my, uh… Bill. This is Bill."

Patty gives him an amused look as she passes Bill his cup, to which he responds with the flattest expression he can manage. Bill seems oblivious, taking the mug reverently.

"Bill Denbrough?" she asks. Bill nods, taking a sip of black coffee and wincing. Stan immediately goes to the fridge to pull out milk for him. "I've read some of your work."

Bill looks a little surprised, but takes it in stride.

"Let me guess," he says, smiling ruefully. "Not a fan of the endings?"

"I have to be honest; I've never made it that far," Patty admits, not at all embarrassed. Stan takes Bill's cup away from him so he can fix it. Bill's eyes trail him absently, but he's still focused on Patty. "I'm not really a fan of horror. I just wanted to see what made Stanley like them so much."

Stan pauses where he's adding milk to Bill's coffee.

"You read my books?" Bill says in disbelief, perhaps remembering the intransigent thirteen-year-old who rolled his eyes endlessly over Richie Tozier's horror movie obsession.

He shrugs, finishes fixing Bill's coffee, and hands it back to him.

"I recognized the name," he says. "I didn't remember you, exactly, but I had a feeling I grew up with the person who wrote them."

Bill stares at him, a little dumbfounded, and Stan just squints curiously.

"What?" he asks. Bill shakes his head.

"Nothing. We just h-have a lot to catch up on."

They exchange some more small talk right there in the kitchen, until Patty ushers them out into the living room so that they can all sit down. It's a little awkward, but comfortable, and Stan finds himself letting them lead the conversation, only chipping in every now and then. It's safe in a way he didn't expect and enough so that when the doorbell rings, he doesn't feel as horrifically afraid as he did the first time.

Even so, the nerves must register in some way on his face, because Bill takes one look at him and soberly says:

"You g-got this, Stan?" in a way that is a question but also isn't. Stan nods tightly, and goes to answer the door.

This time when he opens it, he barely has time to register the presence of two people standing on his doorstep before his arms are suddenly full of World Famous Fashion Designer and Champion Penny Pitcher Beverly Marsh.

"Bev," he says, wincing a bit as he gently touches her back. The force she came at him with knocked his arms a little, and he'll still be sore for a while there.

She pulls back suddenly, hands going to hold the back of his head and neck, thumbs resting on his cheekbones. He knows the shock registers on his face.

"Don't you ever scare us like that again," she says, and there's the moral outrage he's missed. "You understand me?"

Stan nods his head and solemnly promises:

"Yes, ma'am."

For a moment, she just looks at him, angry tears streaming down her face as she searches his. Then, when she can't seem to help it any more, she breaks, smiling in relief as she pulls him in for another hug, gentler this time.

"It's good to see you," she says, then finally steps back and lets Ben have a turn.

Ben is looking at him with soft eyes and a kind smile. When he leans down to hug Stan, it's gentle and all-encompassing. Where Bev smelled like soap and subtle perfume, he smells like wood and leather. Hugging him feels like coming home.

"Hey Stan," he says. "Missed you, buddy."

"I missed you too."

He takes them inside to where Bill and Patty are still sitting on the couch, chatting. They stand up when the three of them walk in.

"Hi, you must be Patricia," Bev says, immediately sweeping towards her with a handshake ready.

Patty takes her hand, but holds it in both of her own instead.

"Beverly?" she asks. Beverly nods and Patty breaks into a warm smile. "It's good to finally meet you in person."

Patty pulls her into a hug, and Stan smiles, watching them. In the background, Ben and Bill exchange a brief hug and greeting.

"Thank you for reaching out to me," Patty says, pulled back, but still holding Beverly by the arms, gently. "I was glad to hear that Stanley had such good friends growing up. It's a relief to know that there were people looking out for him."

Beverly looks a little surprised.

"Really, it was more him looking out for us," she says, almost sheepish.

"I can see it," Patty says, grinning. "Stanley playing the voice of reason in a pack of troublemakers. I bet you talked him into all kinds of antics."

"I was incorruptible," Stan deadpans. Bill snorts.

"Sure you were sweetheart," Patty says. She squeezes Bev one last time, before letting her go.

Ben goes to shake her hand next because he's a gentleman.

"Ben," he says.

"The architect," Patty says. Ben smiles, abashed. "Stan told me about some of your _very_ early work."

Ben looks to Stan in surprise. He shrugs.

"I've been filling Patty in on everyone. And Derry."

He notes the tense, probing glances of his friends, as if they're trying to ask without asking: _how much?_

"I've heard a lot about you all," Patty says, which Stan figures is a safe enough place to start.

"I w-wish we could say the same," Bill says. "But if Stan t-t-trusts you, that's high enough p-praise."

They're all sort of looking at him, and he wants to roll his eyes and say _she can speak for herself_. But he also knows them. He knows what they all grew up around and through, and how hard it is to trust after spending your whole childhood never being able to rely on anyone but your closest friends. So instead, he nods and says:

"Entirely." Then, he turns to Ben and Bev and offers "Coffee?"

Stan listens to his friends catch up on the last couple of weeks and get to know Patty better while he puts together coffee for Bev and Ben. Bev mouths _thank you_ when he hands her hers, and Ben gives him a grateful smile. His eyebrows quirk a little when he looks down into his cup. Stan watches him curiously while he takes a careful sip and winces slightly.

"Something wrong?" Stan asks. Ben's eyes widen when he notices Stan watching him and shakes his head.

"No, it's good. I—" he starts, then deflates a little, smiling ruefully. "It's been a while since I've had coffee other than black."

Bev takes his free hand and squeezes it without looking over, still wrapped up in conversation with Bill and Patty. And Stan would offer to get him a new one, but Ben takes another little sip and smiles, so he doesn't.

It's almost nine when there's another knock at the door, and Stan steels himself. He's getting the hang of this, but it's still hard.

 _Three down, three to go_ , he thinks, and gets up to answer it.

Stan opens the door for the third time this morning to find Mike Hanlon standing on his doorstep, twisting the strap of the bag over his shoulder. He looks sheepish in a way Stan somehow didn't expect, and for a moment, neither of them seems able to say anything. Mute with guilt.

"Stan, I—" Mike takes half a step forward, then aborts. "I'm so sorry. I was so short with you on the phone, and I should have explained better I just— I never thought that— and everyone else— but I should have known better and—"

"Mike, hey," Stan says, reaching out to touch his arms. Mike looks at him, nervously. "It's not your fault."

"Stan…" Mike says, pleading.

"It's not your fault," Stan repeats, as sternly as he can manage. Mike's eyes search his, and for a moment he thinks he's gong to accept it. But then, his eyes light up with understanding, and his expression goes firm. And Mike was always one of the sharpest of them.

"Well, it's not your fault either," Mike says.

For a long moment, they just stare at each other, both too stubborn to back down. Then Stan sighs, and lets his hands fall away from Mike.

"You're right," he concedes, even if he doesn't fully believe it. "It wasn't either of us."

This seems to satisfy Mike about as much as it satisfies him, but he nods curtly and Stan knows it's about as much as he'll be able to convince him at the moment. Then Mike's frown starts to turn watery and Stan can feel his own throat tighten.

He steps towards Mike, who gets the message and leans down to give him a hug. He's gentle, like he thinks Stan is going to shatter in his grasp, but Stan can't really blame him for it. He hears Mike sniff loudly in his ear and feels his tears against his neck.

"I'm okay, Mikey," he assures him through the thickness in his throat. "I'm still here."

Mike sobs quietly, and Stan holds him through it. And Stan knows it will take a long time for them to heal from this. From what they've both done, to themselves, and to each other. But for now, it's enough to be close.

When Mike finally grows quiet, Stan pulls back, and Mike wipes the tears from his face openly. Stan scrubs away the evidence of his own emotions a little more furtively, and catches the way Mike smiles fondly at him. He frowns at him, annoyed at being caught out, but Mike just shakes his head a little and chuckles, and Stan can't help the way his lip quirks upwards.

Then, Stan takes Mike inside to the rest of them.

He's nervous around Patty at first, but she greets him warmly, and being surrounded by friends means it isn't long before he manages to drop the apologetic smiles and lose himself in talking about the things he's seen since leaving Derry two weeks ago. He's been making his way down the coast, to start, but has no intention of stopping for good when he reaches Florida. Just see the beaches, stay for a bit, then start again.

"There's so much to see," he explains, excited in a way that makes him seem thirteen again. "I want to see as much as I can before even thinking about settling down somewhere."

True to form, the last two Losers are late. And Stan knows they're arriving together because Beverly texted him all of their travel plans, but he's pretty sure he would have guessed anyway. It makes things a little easier, he thinks, facing them both at once. Takes some of the pressure off of looking at the only two people he knows who are as afraid of everything as he is and saying _You've been so brave, and I took the coward's way out and left you all to die._

He's a little surprised he can't hear them arguing already when the doorbell finally rings one last time. It's unnerving, knowing who's on the other side of that door and hearing nothing. He even pauses before he opens it, listening for even the rushed whisper-shouts of what the two of them seem to think passes for a quiet argument. But he can't hear anything. He's frowning, even before he opens the door.

When he finally does, it's to about the weirdest scene Stan thinks he's ever been witness to: Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie Tozier standing on his door step, stock-still and completely _silent_. They both look pale and nervous, which he's seen before, but somehow they're not trying to cover it up for once by running their mouths.

That or they genuinely don't know what to say.

Stan holds himself completely still while Richie fidgets a little with the hem of his shirt and the corners of Eddie's frown sink deeper on his face. Stan's actually starting to think _he's_ going to have to come up with something to say, when Richie suddenly speaks, in a Voice high and creaking, and certainly not his own.

_"It's alive!"_

Stan sees Eddie process the words in slow motion as his eyes widen and he turns to Richie, who already seems to be regretting it.

"Beep _fucking_ beep, asshole!" Eddie bursts, reminding Stan as always of a small dog whose feet leave the ground every time he barks. "Can you be an adult for two goddamn seconds? Fuck!"

Then Eddie's surging towards _him_ and Stan barely has time to think before his arms are full of Kaspbrak. It's kind of a lopsided hug, and Stan remembers the feeling of skin tearing and warm blood and doesn't blame Eddie for leaning in with his left side.

"It's really fucking good to see you," Eddie's saying. He squeezes Stan tight, then pulls back quickly, frowning apologetically. "Sorry about…"

He jerks his head back towards Richie, who squawks an indignant "hey!" but doesn't seem too pleased with himself either.

"It's okay. It'll take more than that." He says, and offers up his forearms as proof. "Clearly."

And he'd feel bad about the way Eddie frowns and Richie blanches, except that Richie barks out a nervous laugh and says:

"Okay I get it. Zombie Stan jokes aren't funny, Christ." He runs his hand through his hair, then steps forward. "Come here, you fucking maniac."

Stan snorts a little, but steps forward and lets Richie wrap his ridiculously long arms around him. Richie squeezes him a little tighter than he expects, and he thinks he can feel his fingertips digging lightly into the back of his shirt. Stan holds him close and pretends he doesn't notice the way Richie shudders. When he steps back, a little too quickly, he sniffs once and casually plays off his misty eyes by looking down the street like he heard something. Stan tries not to roll his eyes as he invites them inside.

"Woah! Party's already started," Richie says as they join the assembled group, and Stan and Patty have hosted a couple of Thanksgiving dinners and dinner parties, but he doesn't think their living room has ever felt as full as it does now. Ben, Bev, and Patty are lined up on the couch, and Bill is sitting in the armchair next to Patty. Mike has pulled up one of the dining room chairs and has it positioned on the other end of the sofa, next to Ben.

They all look up as the three of them enter, and Mike and Ben immediately stand to offer their seats up, apparently to Eddie. He looks extremely offended and fixes them all with a disgusted glare while Richie slides in to steal Ben's spot on the couch, throwing his arm across the back of it and around Bev.

"Beverly! Love of my life! How long has it been? Feels like a lifetime."

"It's been four weeks," she says, amused.

"Longest four weeks of my life," Richie says, grinning. "And not even a kiss hello?"

She snorts fondly and leans in to kiss him on the cheek. He pretends to go cross-eyed and Eddie rolls his eyes hard. All the while, Stan surveys the room and does some quick calculations. Before Richie and Eddie showed up, he'd been playing host: getting drinks, giving brief tours of the house, doing everything to stay moving, in his own slow, methodical way, too nervous to sit still and just wait, even if there was pleasant conversation and company to do it in. But now that everyone's here, he's starting to feel weak on his feet and recognizes that they're going to need a few more seats.

"I'll grab some more chairs from the kitchen," he says. "Hold on."

"I can help," Eddie says, starting to follow him.

Bill stands suddenly, fixing them with a firm look.

"Both of you, sit," he says.

Stan narrows his eyes at him, and he's pretty sure Eddie is giving him a similarly annoyed look, but neither of them have every been very good at saying no to Big Bill, so after a very short staring match, Eddie takes Mike's old seat and Stan takes Bill's.

It isn't until he's sitting down that Stan suddenly realizes just how exhausted he is, and he thinks it must show because Patty takes his hand over the arm of his chair and smiles in that fond, and chastising way she gets when Stan tries to do too much and burns himself out. She hands him her drink and he's pretty sure he left his in the kitchen some time ago to go cold. Hers is still warm, and it feels good in his free hand.

Bill makes Mike wait in the living room while he and Ben grab chairs, and Mike just shakes his head, smiling, rather than fight him on it.

"You must be the missus," Richie says, leaning over Beverly to talk to Patty. "Tell me. How did you get Stanley the Stud to finally settle down? He never went steady for me."

Patty smiles, amused.

"You must be the comedian," she says. "Richie, was it?"

"My reputation precedes me!" Richie says, throwing his arms out. He's practically vibrating. "You better watch out Stan. I'm gonna steal your wife."

"I'm not concerned," Stan says, flatly.

Richie winces in overexaggerated offense, holds his chest like he's been wounded.

"Oof," he says. "You're right though. She seems feisty. I don't think I could handle her like you."

Eddie leans over to punch Richie in the arm, but Patty just raises her eyebrows.

"Who says he handles me?" she says.

Richie chokes while Stan takes a nonchalant sip of Patty's coffee, unbothered.

"Stan! I love your wife!"

Patty laughs and Stan refuses to smile.

"The feeling's mutual," he says, breaking a little when Patty glances at him, eyes bright.

Bill, Mike, and Ben are situated by then, completing the other half of the circle with their chairs. It feels right, when Ben finally settles into his chair between Mike and Eddie, and the circle closes. He remembers that feeling from so many summers ago, and is a little surprised to find that Patty's presence doesn't throw it off at all. Not that he wouldn't have her here if it did, but he's relieved that having Patty be a part of this doesn't make it any less Correct. Besides, there's something extremely comforting about being positioned between Patty and Bill. He doesn't think he's ever felt this safe.

"So," Richie says, and Stan hadn't even realized silence had fallen over them until it was abruptly broken. "How's the past few weeks been treating everyone? Therapy? A fair amount of my time has been spent in therapy."

He gets a low chuckle out of Mike, and a few exasperated smiles and headshakes out of the rest of them.

"Speak for yourself, Richie," Bill says, and even though it's with a smile, there's an edge of warning underneath it.

Richie, per usual, ignores this.

"Oh come on, Billy," he says, knee bouncing. "Like we're not fully aware that we're all swimming in a bowl of alphabet soup here. It's like, fucking, mental disorder bingo."

Before anyone can stop him (if anyone _could_ stop him) Richie falls into an old-timey auctioneer Voice.

_"ADHD! ADHD! Going once, going twice… Anyone? Just me? Anxiety! I can already tell we have some takers. PTSD? PTSD all around! And the crowd goes wild!"_

Somewhere along the way, it morphs into a sports commentator Voice, which makes no more sense than the first. Eddie, of course, is happy to point this out.

"Do you have any idea how Bingo works?" he interjects, before Richie can continue.

"Uh, yeah," Richie says, back in his own voice. "I go every week. What do you think your mom and I do for date night?"

"My mother's dead, Richie," Eddie intones, flat.

"Which is why I'm so grateful she takes time out of her busy schedule to see me," Richie says. "Being dead's a lot of work. Stan knows."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Eddie says, and stands, immediately walks out of the room.

"Beep beep," Ben says, watching Eddie go.

Nobody seems very impressed with Richie at the moment, but he looks stubbornly nonchalant, leaning back lazily like it’s a challenge. Even so, Stan can tell he's gone a little white.

"Richie," Bill says, warningly.

"What?" Richie snips, meeting Bill's eyes in challenge and adamantly not looking at Stan, who's sitting right next to him.

Before Bill can say anything, though, Eddie's back. And apparently he just went into the kitchen, because he's holding a mug that he all but shoves into Richie's hands.

"Drink," he orders, and all the stubborn petulance leaves Richie's face in favor of lifting his eyebrows, amused.

"Sure that's a good idea, Eddie?" Mike says, watching warily as Richie downs half of the probably lukewarm coffee in one go.

"Trust me," Eddie says, also watching him for a moment before sitting back down. "It chills him out."

Richie snorts and puts down the mug before he spills it everywhere.

"Eddie figured out one of my secret off-switches and has been exploiting it ever since," he says, then lifts the cup again and murmurs into it, "not even one of the fun ones."

Eddie just rolls his eyes.

"Just drink it and stop being an asshole."

Stan watches them and wonders if they've figured it out yet. He knows they came together, but he also knows that they haven't _been_ together from what Bev told him. Just that their flights came in around the same time, so they decided to split on a rental for the weekend and drive from the airport. Even so, it sounds like they've spent some time in each other's company in the past couple of weeks, and Stan wonders what he's missed.

It's only really hitting him now, just how much he's missed.

"So," Bill says, and a solemn air falls over the room. Stan steels himself, sitting up a little straighter, and Patty brushes her thumb across his knuckles.

Bill turns to Stan.

"Bev said you wanted to wait until everyone was together to talk about what happened," he says. "But if you're not ready, we understand. I'm sure you're curious about what happened in D-Derry, too."

Bill glances at Patty, but when neither of them say anything, he continues.

"So if you'd like us to talk about that first, we can."

Stan shakes his head, not bothering to look around to the other Losers for their reactions.

"No," he says. "I should go first. There's…a lot you need to know."

Bill nods, solemnly, and Stan can't help but cast his gaze around to everyone. They're all watching and he can feel their anticipation. He can also feel their love. It's enough for him to start talking.

"That night, when Mike called," he starts, and Patty squeezes his hand. "Everything came back all at once."

There are some nods, some odd looks. Eddie's eyes are wide. Bev seems confused.

"What do you mean?" she asks.

"I remembered everything," he says. "You guys, Derry…It."

Bev gives a little gasp and Eddie's eyes are bulging. Richie stares numbly at the carpet. Bill looks surprised, but solemn. Mike looks…sad.

"You knew," Stan says, looking at Mike. Not accusing, but Mike looks guilty anyway.

He nods, closing his eyes.

"I didn't think much of it at the time," he says. "Everyone was afraid. But you were the only one to say Its name."

He takes a shaky breath, and Ben puts his hand on his shoulder, earning a small, grateful smile.

"When you didn't show up, I started to wonder… And then when we heard…"

"Is that why you didn't tell us?" Bev asks him. "Why you sent us around to remember things on our own?"

Mike nods.

"I had a feeling that remembering too fast was bad," he said. "But it wasn't until Stan that I realized just how bad it could be."

He looks at Stan, inquisitive and guilty and nervous all at once. Stan nods.

"I couldn't handle it," Stan says. "Everything coming back all at once. And I guess in remembering, I kind of forgot too."

He nudges Patty's hand in his. Normally, he'd squeeze, but his grip strength isn't what it used to be, so he just moves against her. Just to remind her, and himself, that they're both here. Together.

"So I… died," he says. And he doesn't like saying it in such a passive way. He wants to take responsibility for himself, but he also doesn't want them to think about it any more graphically than they already will. So he keeps it vague.

"You did d-die, then," Bill says, a little pale, but steady. "And Patty on the phone…that wasn't one of Its tricks?"

Patty shakes her head.

"I spent 24 hours in a morgue," he says, and hates the way they all look at him for it. "Then I guess I woke up."

"You guess?" Eddie says, high and reedy.

"I don't remember it," Stan says, shrugging. "The first thing I remember was waking up in the hospital. They told me I had blood clots, and that they somehow stopped the bleeding enough to save my life."

Most of them look confused, or a little suspicious, but like they're about ready to believe it. All except one.

"That doesn't make any sense," says Eddie, like he's arguing. "Even if you didn't bleed out all the way, if your heart stopped, something would have had to restart it. That's why they have CPR and like, defibrillators and shit."

"I don't know," Ben says, thoughtfully. "There have been some weird cases where people's hearts have restarted on their own. Bodies are weird."

Stan shakes his head.

"I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit anyway," he says. "I mean, I believe that what the doctors say happened did happen, but I don't think it would have if it wasn't…me."

It's such an insane thing to say, and incredibly self-centered, but the rest of the Losers just nod like it makes perfect sense.

"So what?" Richie says, and he seems a little calmer now, but no less like he might bolt and vomit at any moment. "Stan just magically came back to life?"

Stan thinks it's either a testament to just how upsetting the situation is, or to Eddie's new coffee trick, that he doesn't go on another string of zombie jokes.

Mike shrugs.

"Why not?" he says. "I think it's a little late to start doubting the existence of magic, Richie."

Richie boggles.

"Yeah but it's never been a _good thing_ before! How do we know that this _is_? How do we know Stan's not going to go all _Night of the Living Dead_ and eat all our brains."

"I think you'll be safe if that happens, Rich," Beverly says, patting him reassuringly.

"Think about it," Mike says, putting them back on track. "We know that It is a creature that operates on belief. Little kids believe in scary things, and It uses…used that power to make Itself real. Plenty of people believe in good things. Superstitious luck, fairy tales… Why is it so hard to think that there might be other entities out there, benevolent ones, that operate on the same principle?"

He looks excited by the prospect, and Stan regards him fondly. It's clearly something he's given thought to before, but the way he lays it out for them is like he's discovering it with them. He thinks, not for the first time, that Mike would be a brilliant teacher, if he ever feels like setting down roots again.

"There is," Stan says, and everyone looks at him, surprised by his conviction. "At least one."

"What do you mean?" Bill asks.

"I met it."

Silence falls over them, and Stan can tell from their blank stares that he's going to have to explain. And this is the hard part. Not because he doesn't think they'll believe him or understand, but because this is the part where it feels like he's making excuses.

_I didn't leave you. I was there all along!_

Yeah right.

He breathes in and out, slowly.

"After I died," he says, "and before I woke up, I was…somewhere else. And there was a Turtle."

He thinks this should be the part where they all laugh, or yell at him. The part where they go _stop fucking with us Stan and tell us what really happened._ But they don't. Richie puts on a thin attempt, but it isn't hard to tell that the word "Turtle" shook him about as hard as it did the rest of them.

"You woke up in the afterlife and saw a turtle," he says.

Stan shakes his head.

"I didn't see it," he says. "I couldn't see anything. I…heard it. I guess. It spoke to me."

"So it told you it was a turtle?"

"No."

"Then how do you know it was a—"

"I just know," Stan says, cutting him off, but not angry. "And I think you do too."

Richie curls in on himself a little, quiet, and Stan takes it as his cue to continue.

"It told me to start walking, so I did. And eventually I found myself—"

"In Derry," Mike finishes, and Stan looks at him to find himself meeting a knowing gaze. A little awed, but not surprised. Not entirely. "You were there."

Stan nods.

"You saw me," he guesses. And Mike nods.

"What?" Bev says, looking at Mike. Mike glances at her, nervously.

"In the mirror, at the house on Neibolt street," Mike explains. "It was just for a second, barely even. I thought I'd imagined it, or that Pennywise was just taunting me."

"Hold on," Ben says, looking confused. "When you say you 'were there,' you mean…"

"I was there," Stan explains, "I couldn’t do anything and none of you could see me, but I was there."

"Like a ghost?" Mike prompts, somehow asking and explaining at the same time.

"Exactly like a ghost." Stan nods.

"So wait," Richie says, "while we were losing our minds running around Derry trying not to get murdered, you were Patrick Swayzeing it up?"

Stan stares at him blankly. He looks a little wan. Stan hopes he doesn't puke on the rug.

"You know, funny enough that’s not one of the ones I thought of."

"You were there the whole time?" Bill says. He looks awed a little, and Stan's not exactly sure what to do with that.

"Mostly," he explains. "I arrived at the Jade of the Orient when you did, and I stayed with the group when you were all together, but I didn't follow any of you when you all split up. For the same reason I didn't tell Patty what It came to you as back when we were kids. Those things are yours, and it's your business what you do with them."

He looks at Patty and she smiles at him, understanding. He explained all of this to her before, and she agreed with him then too.

"I also didn't make it all the way to the end," he admits. "I was with you down in the sewers and in the cistern, but then…"

He looks at Eddie, whose eyes, already wide with all of the new information to take in, seem to somehow grow further.

"You saved me," he says in sudden understanding clarity. "Holy fucking shit, I thought I hallucinated it."

"What?" Richie cuts in, staring at Eddie.

The rest of them seem just as surprised, watching Eddie with raised eyebrows. Per usual, Eddie Kaspbrak doesn’t give two shits if people are looking at him.

"When I threw that spear," he says, "I thought I killed It. Obviously I didn't, but I was stupid and completely let my guard down. I didn't see it coming."

The room is quiet, and Richie somehow manages to look even paler. Stan is starting to think the vomit/carpet scenario might actually be a distinct possibility.

"Stan…possessed me," Eddie says, looking a little embarrassed. Stan sits stony, also uncomfortable. He would never regret that decision, never regret taking the only action available to him to save his friend’s life, but he also feels uncomfortable with how invasive it was. And knowing he saw and felt some things he was never meant to see.

"He _what_?" Richie demands, a little in high and manic in disbelief.

Eddie shoots him a hard glare.

"He saved my life, dickhead," he says, sitting up straighter in defiance. "The claw that got me, I never saw it coming. If it wasn't for Stan it would have killed me."

He speaks practically, like it's a simple matter, and not the difference between life and death. But it was never death that Eddie was afraid of, not quite. That much, he and Stan have in common.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Richie says, much more disturbed by Eddie's near-death experience than Eddie is.

"I was half-delusional from blood-loss and head trauma! Excuse me for thinking I _imagined_ getting possessed by my dead friend."

Richie makes like he's about to stand, but Beverly takes his hand and draws him back down. His knee bounces wildly.

"After Eddie," Stan cuts in, trying to wrap it all up as quickly and mercifully as possible. "I couldn't hold on any longer. Whatever was keeping me there took energy, and doing what I did took the rest of it out of me. I thought…"

And he hadn't meant to say this part, he really hadn't. But now it was already half-said so…

"I thought I was letting go for good," Stan says, plainly. "Ghosts are supposed to have some kind of purpose, and it made sense to me that saving Eddie—making sure every one of you came out of that sewer alive—was mine. I did what I had to, and then I was supposed to die. For good. And then I didn't."

Richie does stand then, looking at Stan with surprising indignation. He didn't expect this to piss off Richie as much as it apparently does, but he remembers some of the biting comments Richie made when faced with the understanding that Stan wasn't ever going to show up in Derry.

_He's a fucking pussy, he's not gonna show._

_He was the weakest._

Stan looks up at him solemnly, ready to take whatever Richie's planning on throwing at him.

"So what? You had to die for Eddie to stay alive?" He laughs, horribly. "That's bullshit! That's so fucking—"

He cuts himself off, staring suddenly off to the side with his lips pressed tightly together in a thin, pale, line. Beverly takes his hand again, and he lets her, but he doesn't sit down.

"I don't think so," Stan admits, quietly.

Richie looks at him, surprised, and it's enough for Bev to tug him back down.

"The Turtle said something about contingency plans," he says, slowly. "I think…I wasn't supposed to die at all. If I had just come back to Derry, we all would have walked out in one piece."

He glances at Eddie, who is probably held together by thread and healing tissue, and amends, "More or less."

Nobody says anything, and after a moment he sighs, letting go of Patty's hand to lace his fingers together. He stares at the bandages peaking out from the cuff of his shirt.

"I made a mistake," he admits. "I'm sorry."

There's silence, and he stares at his own thumb, folded over the other. His fingers look pale and thin. It still feels strange to touch them, like he's a few degrees separated from his own skin. Almost like holding someone else's hand instead of his own.

"I don't think there is a 'supposed to,'" Bill says eventually, and Stan looks up to see him looking back, thoughtful. "There's just what happened, and what didn't."

He pauses, and nobody fills the silence.

"And what happened was painful, and scary, but ultimately we're all here together. We made it out." His eyes glint, an almost otherworldly shine in ice blue irises. Then, softer, but just as resolved, he says: "You were scared. None of us can blame you for that."

The weight of his words sit in the spaces between them. And even though they're seated in something more akin to an ellipse, it feels like, in that moment, they've rounded out into a circle. An eight-pointed star.

"Damn, Big Bill," Richie says, shattering it. And Stan's grateful. "Can you do me next? I've also got some crippling insecurities and regrets to work through."

"We know, R-Richie," Bill says, leveling him a look with just enough of that insightful weight leftover that Richie winces.

"Ouch," he says, falling back against the arm of the couch, wounded. Eddie smacks at him, annoyed.

Stan closes his eyes and sits back in his chair. He breathes in, and when it washes back out of him, he feels a good amount of tension go with it. He feels something gentle on his shoulder and looks over to find Patty reaching out to him, giving him an inquisitive look. He smiles at her in a small way, and she returns it.

"Good?" she asks, thumb moving gently over his shoulder-seam, and he loves her so much.

"Good," he says, and she nods.

They're all pretty hungry after that, many of them having skipped breakfast or eaten hours ago in airport cafes. Stan, for his part, had slowly made his way through one dry piece of toast that morning, not having much of a stomach for anything else. So they split up into two cars—Richie, Eddie, Bev and Bill in Richie and Eddie's rental, and Stan, Patty, Ben, and Mike in the sedan—and drive to a nearby diner. It's not where Stan and Patty would normally take guests when hosting people in town, but it's easy and there are plenty of options, and Stan and Patty have been in enough times that they know the couple who run the place, so Stan hopes the good grace they've established there will be enough to get the Losers through a meal without pissing anyone off too bad.

Stan enjoys a relatively quiet drive to the restaurant. He hasn't driven since his hospitalization. Driving has always made him a little nervous in a way he's always kept to himself, and ever since the…incident, he doesn't trust himself not to suddenly make a dangerous maneuver and hurt someone. He's working on it, but his therapist told him to take it at his own pace, and so that's what he's doing. So he rides in the passenger seat while Patty drives, and listens while she, Mike, and Ben have an impassioned, but relatively subdued conversation about the importance of public libraries. Stan chimes in occasionally, but he's tired after the intense emotions of the morning, and mostly listens while they talk about community resources, and closing educational gaps, and the importance of socialization for young children and elderly individuals.

When they get to the diner, it's immediately apparent that the other car did not enjoy a polite colloquy on the merits of public services.

"Why did we split up like that?" Bill scowls as he slams the car door behind him, ignoring Eddie's squawk of displeasure.

"Ben wanted to ask Patty about her school and the rest of you were taking too long," Stan supplies. "So we left."

Bev's laugh rings out as Richie does something stupid that gets on Eddie's nerves and sets him off again, and Stan can't help the small smile that creeps onto his face.

Bill points at Ben, who makes a show of raising his hands innocently, despite the quiet amusement on his face.

"You're riding in their car on the way back," he says.

Ben just smiles and nods, but Richie comes over and throws his arm around Bill's neck, lording his height over him as he grins.

"What? Billy, you seriously want to ditch the Fun Car? I bet they talked about fucking…pension plans or something the whole time."

"Libraries," Stan corrects.

"What," Richie says, flatly, letting Bill shove out from underneath him, shaking his head. "Jeez, I really am friends with a bunch of losers."

Monica takes one look at the large group that walks into the diner and immediately pushes two tables together, counting heads and chairs without asking questions. Ben thanks her, graciously, but she just waves him off at she sets out menus and cutlery. Patty's still chatting idly with Mike about something, so Stan tries to sit next to her on the end of the table, but she catches him before he can, swapping their positions and putting him in between her and Mike. Mike smiles, and Ben takes the seat on his other side, leaving Bill to find a spot on the "fun" side of the table. He sits between Bev and Richie and looks betrayed. Stan thinks about the years he spent wedged between Richie and Eddie while they fought with each other _over_ him as children, and doesn't feel bad for Bill at all.

The couple who run the place are Korean, so there are some Korean dishes mixed in with the more traditional American diner food, and Bev delights in this, citing that it's been too long since she's had bibimbap. Stan guesses there isn't much in the way of multi-cultural cuisine out in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. Bill openly gags at Stan's egg salad sandwich, and Richie tries to tempt him with bacon until Eddie whacks him on the back of the head and reminds him that it wasn't cute when they were kids, and it certainly isn't cute now.

 _This is how it's supposed to be_ , he thinks, listening to Richie and Eddie squabble, and Bev ruthlessly pick apart one of Bill's recent movies, and Mike and Ben chat amiably about traveling. Richie and Patty get along disturbingly well, and Eddie is particularly curious about the funny things students of hers have gotten up to, and when Bev cuts in and asks them if they're planning to have kids, Stan doesn't even have to look at his wife to state with certainty that the answer is yes.

And later they'll all go back home and take a group nap in various locations around Stan and Patty's house because they're all old, and healing, and jet-lagged in various measures, and Stan will wake up on the sofa with his head in Patty's lap, and his feet in Mike's as they chat about mythology in quiet voices, and the next day Stan and Patty will show everyone around their favorite places in Atlanta, all of the little spots where Stan's lived his life that he finally gets to share with the most important people in it, and they'll eat good food and drink too much, and that night, or the next morning, they'll all leave and go their separate ways but promise that this won't be the last time and that they'll all be in each other's lives for real and for as long as they live them.

And this time, Stan will believe them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this finished two days ago, but I was so close to 30,000 total words and I really wanted to break that threshold lol. This might be the longest thing I've ever finished, which is cool as hell in my personal opinion. I've been so very obsessed with It recently, and I'm hoping to write a bit more in this universe (*cough* reddie *cough* (but also tbh i kind of want to write a Mike road-trip fic lol)) Uhh but we'll see because school started up for me like, yesterday and I stacked courses this quarter so. You know. Point being, I really hope you liked it. Happy spooky season :o)

**Author's Note:**

> Things I've researched for Second Chances (non-comprehensive):  
> • Jewish burial rites  
> • Clint Eastwood Movies  
> • The Scottish Rite Club  
> • "English phrases with tongue"  
> • Airplane landing protocol  
> • Causes of low water pressure  
> • The danger of galvanized pipes in old houses  
> • 80s sodas  
> • Birds native to Maine (also birds more generally)  
> • The Thomas Hill Standpipe  
> • Hospitals and morgues in Atlanta GA  
> • A lot about blood clots and various arteries  
> • Shock (not that I understood it at all but I tried lol)  
> • Suicide watch  
> • Dissociative Amnesia  
> • Divorce laws in New York  
> • Stitches and wound cleaning  
> • Squirrels  
> • Ethiopian dishes  
> • Fruit baskets  
> • OCD  
> • Laundry prices and money inflation  
> • Types of forests in Nebraska (Bev and Ben live in an elm-ash-cottonwood forest because I said so)  
> 


End file.
